Paleobiology Database

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Paleobiology Database: Revealing the History of Life

The Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is an online resource for information on the distribution and classification of fossil animals, plants, and microorganisms.

History

The Paleobiology Database originated in the

University of Wisconsin-Madison
and overseen by an international committee of major data contributors.

The Paleobiology Database works closely with the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, which has a similar intellectual history, but has focused on the Quaternary (with an emphasis on the late Pleistocene and Holocene) at timescales of decades to millennia. Together, Neotoma and the Paleobiology Database have helped launch the EarthLife Consortium, a non-profit umbrella organization to support the easy and free sharing of paleoecological and paleobiological data.

Researchers

Partial list of contributing researchers:[2]

Criticism

Donald Prothero has asserted that for several Cenozoic mammal families, range data in the PBDB are exaggerated due to uncritical inclusion of mistaken data.[3]

References

  1. ^ "National Center for Ecological Analysis, an overview". Archived from the original on 2016-03-19. Retrieved 2014-05-20.
  2. ^ "Reference for contributing researchers". Archived from the original on 2016-03-07. Retrieved 2014-05-20.
  3. ^ Prothero, D. (2015). Garbage in, garbage out: The effect of immature taxonomy on database compilations of North American fossil mammals. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin, 68, 257–264.