Data from: Evaluating the accuracy of biodiversity changes through geological times: from simulation to solution

Estimating biodiversity and its variations through geological time is a notoriously difficult task, due to several taphonomical and methodological reasons making the reconstructed signal potentially distinct from the unknown, original one. Through a simulation approach, we examine the effect of a major, while surprisingly still understudied source of potential disturbance: the effect of time discretization through biochronological construction, generating spurious coexistences of taxa within discrete time intervals, and thus potentially making continuous- and discrete-time biodiversity curves very different. Focusing on the taxonomic richness dimension of biodiversity, our approach relies on the random generation of continuous-time richness curves, then time-discretized to estimate the actual noise generated by this manipulation. A broad spectrum of dataset parameters are evaluated through sensitivity analysis, showing that the worsening effect of time discretization on the richness signal highly depends on such parameters, most particularly on average biozone duration and taxonomic longevity because of their direct relationship with the number of false coexistence generated by time discretization. With several worst-case but realistic parameter combinations, the original and time-discretized richness curves can ultimately show a very weak to null correlation, making these two time series independent. Based on these simulation results, we propose a simple algorithm allowing the back-transformation of a discrete-time taxonomic richness dataset as customarily constructed by palaeontologists into a continuous-time dataset. We show that the reconstructed richness curve obtained this way fits the original signal much more closely, even when the original dataset parameter combination is particularly hostile to an effective time-discretized reconstruction.