Deep-time biodiversity patterns and the dinosaurian fossil record of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior, North America

In order for palaeontological data to be informative ecologists seeking understand the causes of today's diversity patterns, palaeontologists must demonstrate that actual biodiversity patterns are preserved in our reconstructions past ecosystems. During Late Cretaceous, North America was divided into two landmasses, Laramidia and Appalachia. Previous work has suggested strong faunal provinciality on at this time, but these arguments almost entirely qualitative. We quantitatively investigated ceratopsid hadrosaurid dinosaurs using a biogeographic network approach sampling biases by examining correlations between dinosaur occurrences collections. carried out model-fitting generalized least-squares regression investigate sources bias we identified. find while raw strongly support provinciality, result is driven bias. The quality ceratopsids hadrosaurids currently too poor enable fair tests provincialism, even intensively sampled region, which probably represents best-known Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystem Earth. To accurately reconstruct deep future should focus smaller scale, higher resolution case studies effects can better controlled.