The Fezouata Shale Formation biota is typical for the high latitudes of the early Ordovician – a quantitative approach

The Fezouata Shale Formation has dramatically impacted our understanding of early Ordovician marine ecosystems before the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), thanks to the abundance and quality of exceptionally preserved animals within. Systematic work has noted that the shelly fossil sub-assemblages of the Fezouata Shale biota are typical of open-marine deposits from the Lower Ordovician, but no studies have tested the quantitative validity of this statement. We extracted 491 occurrences of recalcitrant fossil genera from the Paleobiology Database to reconstruct 31 sub-assemblages, to explore the paleoecology of the Fezouata Shale and other contemporary, high-latitude (66°S – 90°S) deposits from the Lower Ordovician (485.4 Ma – 470 Ma) and test the interpretation that the Fezouata Shale biota is typical for an Ordovician open-marine environment. Sørensen’s dissimilarity metrics and Wilcoxon tests indicate that the sub-assemblages of the Tremadocian-aged lower Fezouata Sha..., Script 1: Rstudio Script used to process and manipulate datasets, and to create visualizations and run statistical tests. 
Dataset 1: Early Ordovician occurence data downloaded from the paleobiological database (Early Ordovician PBDB). 
Dataset 2: Taxa from Dataset 1 that were categorized as either Biomineralizing or Conventional. The sheets labeled \"Notes and Legend for Excel Docu\" outlines the symbols used to delineate classification of taxonomic levels examined in all other sheets. The sheet labeled \"Phyla Level\" pertains to which metazoan phyla are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled \"Class Level\" pertains to which metazoan classes are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled \"Order Level\" pertains to which metazoan orders are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled \"Family Level\" pertains to which metazoan families are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled \"Genera Level\" pertains to which metazoan genera are biomineralizi..., , # Data from: the Fezouata Shale Formation biota is typical for the high latitudes of the early Ordovician – a quantitative approach

Dataset 1: Downloaded from the paleobiological database ([Early Ordovician PBDB](https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/list.csv?datainfo&rowcount&max_ma=485.4&min_ma=443.8&show=class,classext,genus,coords,loc,paleoloc,strat,stratext,lith,lithext,env) \"Early Ordovician PBDB\")). 

Data Provider/Source: The Paleobiology Database

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This occurence data was downloaded from the Paleobiology Database on June 21st 2022, setting the maximum age to 485.4 and the minimum age to 443.8. 

Dataset 2: Taxa from Dataset 1 that were categorized as either Biomineralizing or Conventional. The sheets labeled \"Notes and Legend for Excel Docu\" outlines the symbols used to delineate classification of taxonomic levels examined in all other sheets. The sheet labeled \"Phyla Level\" pertains to which metazoan phyla are biomineralizing, conven...