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PHYSICAL SCIENCES / BIOLGICAL SCIENCES / GEOLOGY / EVOLUTION
Estimating the diversity of dinosaurs

Steve C. Wang^*, and Peter Dodson

*Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081; and School of Veterinary Medicine and Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3800 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Communicated by David M. Raup, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, July 19, 2006 (received for review June 14, 2006)

Despite current interest in estimating the diversity of fossil and extant groups, little effort has been devoted to estimating the diversity of dinosaurs. Here we estimate the diversity of nonavian dinosaurs at 1,850 genera, including those that remain to be discovered. With 527 genera currently described, at least 71% of dinosaur genera thus remain unknown. Although known diversity declined in the last stage of the Cretaceous, estimated diversity was steady, suggesting that dinosaurs as a whole were not in decline in the 10 million years before their ultimate extinction. We also show that known diversity is biased by the availability of fossiliferous rock outcrop. Finally, by using a logistic model, we predict that 75% of discoverable genera will be known within 60–100 years and 90% within 100–140 years. Because of nonrandom factors affecting the process of fossil discovery (which preclude the possibility of computing realistic confidence bounds), our estimate of diversity is likely to be a lower bound.

abundance-based coverage estimator | completeness | Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction | fossil record bias | rock availability

Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: scwang{at}swarthmore.edu

© 2006 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

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