Quality of the fossil record through time
@article{Benton2000QualityOT, title={Quality of the fossil record through time}, author={Michael J. Benton and Matthew Albion Wills and Rebecca Hitchin}, journal={Nature}, year={2000}, volume={403}, pages={534-537} }
Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life, or should it be viewed with caution? Raup argued that plots of the diversification of life were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks, the less we know. The debate was partially resolved by the observation that different data sets gave similar patterns of rising diversity through time. Here we show that new assessment methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks (stratigraphy) is compared with the order inherent…
190 Citations
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- Environmental Science, GeographyJournal of the Geological Society
- 2007
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- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2001
Results provide support for the hypothesis that the fossil record of arthropods is less complete (at levels of stratigraphic and taxonomic resolution pertinent to most macroevolutionary studies) than the records of several other taxa.
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- BiologyProceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences
- 2001
Comparisons of phylogenies of four major groups do not show uniform improvement, or decline, of fit to stratigraphy through the twentieth century, nor do morphological or molecular trees differ uniformly in their performance.
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- Geology, GeographyProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- 2007
It is demonstrated that ghost ranges are indeed relatively common in some of the oldest strata of the Phanerozoic, and that this pattern results from the interplay between several complex factors and is not a simple function of the completeness of the fossil record.
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