Marine animal diversity across latitudinal and temperature gradients during the Phanerozoic

The latitudinal biodiversity gradient (LBG) is a fundamental biological pattern seen across taxa and ecosystems today, but its drivers remain uncertain despite intense theoretical and empirical study. Palaeontological studies may add valuable evidence from diversity distributions during intervals when Earth system configurations were different from today, including potential analogues of future climate regimes. However, accurately characterising these distributions is challenging because the geographic scope of fossil record coverage varies through time, introducing biases that have not been quantified by most previous studies. Here, we attempt a comprehensive documentation of latitudinal biodiversity distributions for marine invertebrates through the past 540 million years, explicitly accounting for regional variation in diversity and sampling. We demonstrate large uncertainties when using current fossil data at this scale. Nevertheless, some signals are detectable. We show that marine..., We analysed occurrence data for 25,855 genera of marine invertebrate animals (Animalia excluding Chordata) downloaded from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB; paleobiodb.org; a list of data enterers who contributed to this dataset is included as Dataset S1) on 2022-07-12, and made available with our analytical scripts here. Our analytical scripts implement the methods described in Benson et al. (2025; see 'related works')., , # Data from: Marine animal diversity across latitudinal and temperature gradients during the Phanerozoic

## Data description

This repository contains the occurrence data for marine animals downloaded from the Paleobiology Database ([www.paleobiodb.org](http://www.paleobiodb.org)) in CSV format, which was used to run this analysis.

## Code/software

The code described above was run in R version 4.2.1. All analysis scripts and associated files necessary to run the analysis are archived on Zenodo [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15269136](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15269136)

## Access information

The occurrence data for marine animals were downloaded from the Paleobiology Database ([www.paleobiodb.org](http://www.paleobiodb.org)) on 2022-05-23-14-15-24.

## Summary of file directory

marine-lbg-ms-dryad-repo

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README.txt

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PBDB_CSV_data_downloads

2022-05-23-14-15-24 - Subfolder containing occurrence data analysed in the stud...,