AN INTRODUCTION OF METHODS FOR REMOVING BIASES IN ESTABLISHING BIODIVERSITY PATTERNS FROM FOSSIL RECORDS
Article
Figures
Metrics
Preview PDF
Reference
Related
Cited by
Materials
Abstract:
Sampling biases have been recently recognized by many palaeobiologists as the pitfalls of under-sampled intervals and diversity data, therefore have become a major problem in analyzing diversity patterns during the earth history. In this paper we introduced and reviewed some biases in measuring biodiversities from fossil records using the Ordovician database of marine fossils and the Permian brachiopod database in the Asian-Western Pacific region as examples. The simplest method to count the number of taxa to measure the biodiversity may produce significant biases to distort the diversity pattern due to the different preservation and sampling intensities of various fossils. Palaeobiological biodiversity curves mostly should be corrected using rarefaction when taxonomic lists or occurrences of fossils are available. Most metrics or methods are worth applying although no perfect one removing biases is available yet.
