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Brute-Force Biochronology: Sequencing Paleobiologic First- and Last-Appearance Events by Trial-and-Error

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2017

Peter M. Sadler
Peter M. Sadler*
Affiliation:
Department of Earth Science, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521
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Abstract

Computers excel at applying simple, logical rules to prodigious amounts of information. Such is the nature of biochronology. Range charts of first- and last-occurrences of fossil species must be combined from many locations to compensate for local incompleteness of the fossil record. Enlarging the geographic scope adds the complications of faunal migration and provinciality – for which the remedy is yet more information. Expert biostratigraphers have managed to divide Phanerozoic time into hundreds of biozones by limiting the amount of information they consider. A set of biozones specifies the sequence of only a fraction of available species, typically from a single clade in a particular province across a limited time interval. Once the human expertise applied to this task is rendered into logical algorithms, computers can extend the exercise to huge data sets of otherwise unmanageable scope.

Two factors make this computer-assisted sequencing of first- and last-appearance events easy to understand and implement: the biostratigraphers' ground rules are straightforward and the computations, although tediously repetitive, proceed by simply analogy rather than esoteric mathematics. Two other factors force the outcome to be a set of time lines that fit the field data equally well: there is rarely enough information to identify a unique best-fit solution and there is more than one set of expert ground-rules for measuring the fitness of paleobiologic time-lines. A set of equally well-fit time lines serves as an appropriate statement of uncertainty in the order of events. Mapping the local ranges back into a best-fit composite range can reveal biogeographic and taxonomic complications; quality control and interpretation advance together.

Type
Stratigraphic Data
Information
The Paleontological Society Papers , Volume 16: Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology , October 2010 , pp. 271 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by the Paleontological Society 

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