ArticleNature communications2017
Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global patterns are key to understanding macroevolution.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Fossil record biases skew inferences of mammal trait evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Late Cretaceous community structure changed before the asteroid.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Tetrapod species-area relationships across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The spatiotemporal distribution of Mesozoic dinosaur diversity.Biology letters · 2024Review
- The macroecology of Mesozoic dinosaurs.Biology letters · 2024Review
- A brief review of non-avian dinosaur biogeography: state-of-the-art and prospectus.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Late Cretaceous ammonoids show that drivers of diversification are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The decline and fall of the mammalian stem.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Mechanistic phylodynamic models do not provide conclusive evidence that non-avian dinosaurs were in decline before their final extinction.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Article
- The skeletal completeness of the Palaeozoic chondrichthyan fossil record.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Challenges and directions in analytical paleobiology.Paleobiology · 2023Article
- Clade density and the evolution of diversity-dependent diversification.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The early diversification of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii): hypotheses, challenges and future prospects.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Sampling biases obscure the early diversification of the largest living vertebrate group.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Global diversity dynamics in the fossil record are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Tooth morphology elucidates shark evolution across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Taxonomic identification bias does not drive patterns of abundance and diversity in theropod dinosaurs.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Spatial sampling heterogeneity limits the detectability of deep time latitudinal biodiversity gradients.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Flat latitudinal diversity gradient caused by the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Variation in the geographic spread of fossil localities strongly biases inferences about the evolution of biodiversity, due to the ubiquitous scaling of species richness with area. This obscures answers to key questions, such as how tetrapods attained their tremendous extant diversity. Here, we address this problem by applying sampling standardization methods to spatial regions of equal size, within a global Mesozoic-early Palaeogene data set of non-flying terrestrial tetrapods. We recover no significant increase in species richness between the Late Triassic and the Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K/Pg) boundary, strongly supporting bounded diversification in Mesozoic tetrapods. An abrupt tripling of richness in the earliest Palaeogene suggests that this diversity equilibrium was reset following the K/Pg extinction. Spatial heterogeneity in sampling is among the most important biases of fossil data, but has often been overlooked. Our results indicate that controlling for variance in geographic spread in the fossil record significantly impacts inferred patterns of diversity through time.
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