Data from: The sampling and estimation of marine paleodiversity patterns: implications of a Pliocene model

Data that accurately capture the spatial structure of biodiversity are
required for many paleobiological questions, from assessments of changing
provinciality and the role of geographic ranges in extinction and
originations, to estimates of global taxonomic or morphological diversity
through time. Studies of temporal changes in diversity and global
biogeographic patterns have attempted to overcome fossil sampling biases
through sampling standardization protocols, but such approaches must
ultimately be limited by available literature and museum collections. One
approach to evaluating such limits is to compare results from the fossil
record with models of past diversity patterns informed by modern
relationships between diversity and climatic factors. Here we use
present-day patterns for marine bivalves, combined with data on the
geologic ages and distributions of extant taxa, to develop a model for
Pliocene diversity patterns, which is then compared with diversity
patterns retrieved from the literature as compiled by the Paleobiology
Database (PaleoDB). The published Pliocene bivalve data (PaleoDB) lack the
first-order spatial structure required to generate the modern biogeography
within the time available (<3 Myr). Instead, the published data
(raw and standardized) show global diversity maxima in the Tropical West
Atlantic, followed closely by a peak in the cool-temperate East Atlantic.
Either today's tropical West Pacific diversity peak, double that of
any other tropical region, is a purely Pleistocene phenomenon—highly
unlikely given the geologic ages of extant genera and the topology of
molecular phylogenies—or the paleontological literature is such a
distorted sample of tropical Pliocene diversity that current sampling
standardization methods cannot compensate for existing biases. A rigorous
understanding of large-scale spatial and temporal diversity patterns will
require new approaches that can compensate for such strong bias,
presumably by drawing more fully on our understanding of the factors that
underlie the deployment of diversity today.