Data from: On the basis of stasis: documentation of taxonomy durations in paleontology and the necessity of museum voucher specimens

Most species exhibit morphological stasis following speciation and this is
a key feature of the concept of punctuated equilibria. Stasis results in
species often having long durations on geological time scales. Durational
data are fundamental to many types of paleobiological analyses and are
ideally based on occurrence data represented by specimens in museum
collections. Often, however, durational data are presented without
supporting information about voucher specimens that document stratigraphic
ranges, including first and last appearances. We use the iconic Devonian
trilobite Eldredgeops rana to demonstrate that durational data can be
challenging to determine at multiple taxonomic levels. Further, we show
that different datasets—including Sepkoski’s published databases, the
Paleobiology Database, and iDigBio—give discordant results concerning
first and last occurrences. We argue that paleontologists should adopt two
general best practices to help address these problems. First, systematists
should clearly identify voucher specimens that represent stratigraphic
occurrences of species. Second, we recommend that high-quality photographs
of occurrence vouchers be placed in open access websites and be assigned
public domain licensing prior to being paywalled by journals. Such voucher
images also have a role to play in training artificial intelligence (AI)
systems that will be applied to future paleobiological questions.