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Relative oversampling of carbonate rocks in the North American marine fossil record

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2023

Diego Balseiro Open the ORCID record for Diego Balseiro [Opens in a new window]  and
Matthew G. Powell Open the ORCID record for Matthew G. Powell [Opens in a new window]
Diego Balseiro*
Affiliation:
Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Avenida Vélez Sarsfield 1611 Ciudad Universitaria, Córdoba X5016GCA Argentina; CONICET, Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Tierra (CICTERRA), Córdoba X5016GCA, Argentina. E-mail: dbalseiro@unc.edu.ar
Matthew G. Powell
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, Juniata College, 1700 Moore Street, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania 16652 USA. E-mail: powell@juniata.edu
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

Paleontologists have long stressed the need to know how sampling the fossil record might influence our knowledge of the evolution of life. Here, we combine fossil occurrences of North American marine invertebrates from the Paleobiology Database with lithologic data from Macrostrat to identify sampling patterns in carbonate and siliciclastic rocks. We aim to quantify temporal trends in sampling effort within and between lithologies, focusing on the proportion of total available volume that has been sampled (sampled fossiliferous proportion, here called κ). Results indicate that the sampled fossiliferous proportion was stable during the Paleozoic, and variable during the post-Paleozoic, but showed no systematic increase through time. Fossiliferous carbonate rocks are proportionally more sampled than siliciclastic rocks, with intervals where the carbonate κ is double the siliciclastic κ. Among possible explanations for the apparent oversampling of fossiliferous carbonate rocks, analyses suggest that barren units, taphonomic dissolution, or data entry errors cannot completely explain sampling patterns. Our results suggest that one of the important drivers might be that paleontologists publish taxonomic descriptions from carbonate rocks more frequently. The higher diversity in carbonate rocks might account for an ease in the description of unknown species and therefore a higher rate of published fossils. Finally, a strong effect in favor of carbonate rocks might distort our perception of diversity through time, even under commonly used standardization methods. Our results also confirm that previous descriptions of an increase in the proportion of sampled fossiliferous rocks over time were driven by the sampling of the nonmarine fossil record.

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Article
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Paleobiology , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 733 - 746
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Paleontological Society

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