Dunhill, AM, Hannisdal, B, Brocklehurst, N et al. (1 more author) (2018) On formation-based sampling proxies and why they should not be used to correct the fossil record. Palaeontology, 61 (1). pp. 119-132. ISSN 0031-0239
Abstract
The fossil record is a unique resource on the history of life, but it is well known to be incomplete. In a series of high-profile papers, a residual modelling technique has been applied to correct the raw palaeodiversity signal for this bias and incompleteness, and the claim is made that the processed time series are more accurate than the raw data. We apply empirical and simulation approaches to test for correlation and directionality of any relationships between rock and fossil data. The empirical data comprise samples of the global fossil record through the Phanerozoic, and we use simulations to assess whether randomly sampled subsets of modelled data can be improved by application of the residual modelling technique. Our results show that using formation counts as a sampling proxy to correct the fossil record via residual modelling is ill founded. The supposedly independent model of sampling is information-redundant with respect to the raw palaeodiversity data it seeks to correct, and so the outputs are generally likely to be further from the truth than the raw data. We recommend that students of palaeodiversity cease to use residual modelling estimates based on formation counts, and suggest that results from a substantial number of papers published in the past ten years require re-evaluation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Authors. Palaeontology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Palaeontological Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | sampling proxy; bias; palaeodiversity; redundancy; residual modelling; Phanerozoic |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Earth Surface Science Institute (ESSI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Leverhulme Trust ECF-2015-044 NERC NE/P013724/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Sep 2017 13:40 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 22:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/pala.12331 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:121276 |