This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Fossils offer a glimpse into Earth's distant past. They provide insights into extinct animals and plants, as well as past ecosystems.
However, the fossil record is incomplete: Fossilization is rare, and only a small fraction of Earth's organisms are preserved this way. In addition, geological strata from different eras must be accessible today for fossils to be found in them. Our knowledge of past life is distributed unevenly across geological eras and geographic regions.
Some eras and regions appear to be well-researched, with numerous fossils already found there. In contrast, we still know very little about others. Fossil excavations are extremely time-consuming and expensive, so it is important to focus efforts on areas likely to yield new information.
Neubauer of the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) and his colleague Mathias Harzhauser of the Natural History Museum in Vienna are providing researchers with a tool for that purpose. In their study, the two paleontologists quantified the spatial distribution of all fossil finds of animals from shallow-water marine environments over the past 540 million years—and, for the first time, marked locations on a world map where fossil data is lacking. The researchers searched the archives of the Paleobiology Database (PBDB).
The PBDB is a major freely accessible database of fossil records and encompasses a large portion of published paleontological information. The researchers mapped all marine shallow-water areas throughout Earth's history that, according to the PBDB, contained fossil data. They also tracked historical trends in paleontological research on this habitat, documenting the rate at which research in specific regions has yielded new information over decades and centuries.
The researchers cross-referenced this data with geological data from the Macrostat database. The research is published in the journal Science Advances. The analysis revealed that the Mesozoic Era (about 252 to 66 million years ago) and the Paleozoic Era (about 539 to 252 million years ago) are particularly well-studied.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
