ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Spatial sampling heterogeneity limits the detectability of deep time latitudinal biodiversity gradients.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fossil record biases skew inferences of mammal trait evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Rise of modern marine fishes captured in an early Paleocene Lagerstätte.Science advances · 2026Article
- Gaps and drivers of global marine animal biodiversity from the surface to abyss.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Carbonate burial regimes, the Meso-Cenozoic climate, and nannoplankton expansion.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
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Impact of global climate cooling on Ordovician marine biodiversity.Nature communications · 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
- Deep-time biodiversity patterns and the dinosaurian fossil record of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior, North America.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The latitudinal biodiversity gradient (LBG), in which species richness decreases from tropical to polar regions, is a pervasive pattern of the modern biosphere. Although the distribution of fossil occurrences suggests this pattern has varied through deep time, the recognition of palaeobiogeographic patterns is hampered by geological and anthropogenic biases. In particular, spatial sampling heterogeneity has the capacity to impact upon the reconstruction of deep time LBGs. Here we use a simulation framework to test the detectability of three different types of LBG (flat, unimodal and bimodal) over the last 300 Myr. We show that heterogeneity in spatial sampling significantly impacts upon the detectability of genuine LBGs, with known biodiversity patterns regularly obscured after applying the spatial sampling window of fossil collections. Sampling-standardization aids the reconstruction of relative biodiversity gradients, but cannot account for artefactual absences introduced by geological and anthropogenic biases. Therefore, we argue that some previous studies might have failed to recover the 'true' LBG type owing to incomplete and heterogeneous sampling, particularly between 200 and 20 Ma. Furthermore, these issues also have the potential to bias global estimates of past biodiversity, as well as inhibit the recognition of extinction and radiation events.
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