ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
The apparent exponential radiation of Phanerozoic land vertebrates is an artefact of spatial sampling biases.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global patterns are key to understanding macroevolution.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Global and regional climate change impacted Paleogene mammal faunas in Central Asia.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Fossil record biases skew inferences of mammal trait evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Energy Dissipation Model of the Evolutionary Imperative.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Persistent body size bias in the fossil record of Cenozoic North American mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The fate of South America's endemic mammalian fauna in response to the most dramatic Cenozoic climate disruption.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
- New frontiers in dinosaur exploration.Biology letters · 2025Review
- Museum 'dark data' show variable impacts on deep-time biogeographic and evolutionary history.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Simulating macroevolutionary trends and open-ended evolution with a novel mechanistic multi-level approach.PloS one · 2025Article
- The spatiotemporal distribution of Mesozoic dinosaur diversity.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Reliable biogeography requires fossils: insights from a new species-level phylogeny of extinct and living carnivores.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Late Cretaceous ammonoids show that drivers of diversification are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2024Article
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The decline and fall of the mammalian stem.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Mechanistic neutral models show that sampling biases drive the apparent explosion of early tetrapod diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Challenges and directions in analytical paleobiology.Paleobiology · 2023Article
- The early diversification of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii): hypotheses, challenges and future prospects.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Biogeographic history of Palearctic caudates revealed by a critical appraisal of their fossil record quality and spatio-temporal distribution.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Sampling biases obscure the early diversification of the largest living vertebrate group.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
There is no consensus about how terrestrial biodiversity was assembled through deep time, and in particular whether it has risen exponentially over the Phanerozoic. Using a database of 60 859 fossil occurrences, we show that the spatial extent of the worldwide terrestrial tetrapod fossil record itself expands exponentially through the Phanerozoic. Changes in spatial sampling explain up to 67% of the change in known fossil species counts, and these changes are decoupled from variation in habitable land area that existed through time. Spatial sampling therefore represents a real and profound sampling bias that cannot be explained as redundancy. To address this bias, we estimate terrestrial tetrapod diversity for palaeogeographical regions of approximately equal size. We find that regional-scale diversity was constrained over timespans of tens to hundreds of millions of years, and similar patterns are recovered for major subgroups, such as dinosaurs, mammals and squamates. Although the Cretaceous/Palaeogene mass extinction catalysed an abrupt two- to three-fold increase in regional diversity 66 million years ago, no further increases occurred, and recent levels of regional diversity do not exceed those of the Palaeogene. These results parallel those recovered in analyses of local community-level richness. Taken together, our findings strongly contradict past studies that suggested unbounded diversity increases at local and regional scales over the last 100 million years.
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