Nature Communications (May 2017)
Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification
Abstract
Species richness increases with area sampled, potentially confounding biodiversity patterns from the fossil record. Here, the authors standardize spatial sampling to control for this bias and show that terrestrial vertebrate diversification was bounded during the Mesozoic but that equilibria were reset following the K/Pg extinction.