Dean, Christopher D;
Thompson, Jeffrey R;
(2025)
Museum ‘dark data’ show variable impacts on deep-time biogeographic and evolutionary history.
Proc Biol Sci B
, 292
(2041)
, Article 20242481. 10.1098/rspb.2024.2481.
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Abstract
The age of digitally accessible datasets has transformed palaeontology, enabling previously impossible macroevolutionary insights. However, a substantial reservoir of generally inaccessible ‘dark data’ resides within museum collections, which may alter our understanding of ancient groups and their ecological and evolutionary history. We demonstrate how the addition of data held exclusively in museums impacts our macroevolutionary understanding of an entire taxonomic group, using a dataset of Palaeozoic echinoids containing the majority of museum occurrences for the clade. We find that museum ‘dark data’ shows clear differences in composition compared to data available in the published literature and strongly impacts biogeographic patterns, increasing the average geographic range size of taxa by 35%. Global model results assessing drivers of diversity are also significantly affected by the addition of museum-only data. Conversely, ‘dark data’ have a more limited impact on the temporal ranges of taxa or estimates of overall diversity and are impacted by similar socio-geographic biases as the published record. These findings show that unpublished museum data are necessary to obtain a complete understanding of macroevolutionary patterns in deep-time, illustrating the importance of the collection, curation, digitization and continued care of ‘dark data’ in the age of ‘Big Data’ in palaeobiology.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Museum ‘dark data’ show variable impacts on deep-time biogeographic and evolutionary history |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1098/rspb.2024.2481 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2481 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Paleobiology Database, big data, collections, curation, fossil record bias, Museums, Biological Evolution, Animals, Fossils, Paleontology, Biodiversity, Echinodermata, Phylogeography |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206153 |
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