Quick Search:    advanced search

GSW Home   GeoRef Home   My GSW Alerts   Contact GSW   About GSW   Journals List   Help

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Google Scholar Articles by Miller, A. I. Articles by Kiessling, W.

Phanerozoic trends in the global geographic disparity of marine biotas

¹ Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221 arnold.miller{at}uc.edu
² Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany

Previous analyses of the history of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity suggested that the post-Paleozoic increase observed at the family level and below was caused, in part, by an increase in global provinciality associated with the breakup of Pangea. Efforts to characterize the Phanerozoic history of provinciality, however, have been compromised by interval-to-interval variations in the methods and standards used by researchers to calibrate the number of provinces. With the development of comprehensive, occurrence-based data repositories such as the Paleobiology Database (PaleoDB), it is now possible to analyze directly the degree of global compositional disparity as a function of geographic distance (geo-disparity) and changes thereof throughout the history of marine animal life. Here, we present a protocol for assessing the Phanerozoic history of geo-disparity, and we apply it to stratigraphic bins arrayed throughout the Phanerozoic for which data were accessed from the PaleoDB. Our analyses provide no indication of a secular Phanerozoic increase in geo-disparity. Furthermore, fundamental characteristics of geo-disparity may have changed from era to era in concert with changes to marine venues, although these patterns will require further scrutiny in future investigations.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. I. Miller and M. Foote Epicontinental Seas Versus Open-Ocean Settings: The Kinetics of Mass Extinction and Origination Science, November 20, 2009; 326(5956): 1106 - 1109. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]