COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE PUBLISHED AND SAMPLED FOSSIL RECORD IN TWO MIDDLE CAMBRIAN GREAT BASIN LAGERSTÄTTEN OF THE WESTERN USA

Recent discussions on the role of biases in the study of the fossil record, including the unequal presence of taxa in collections, dissimilarities in curation, and preferences in sample publication (e.g., Whitaker and Kimmig, 2020 Paleontologica Electronica), reveal the need for a quantitative investigation into their causes and consequences. Here we will define specific discrepancies between the published and sampled fossil record in the Marjum and Wheeler Formations of the western United States and evaluate the implications that these discrepancies may impose on our understanding of the paleoecology of the Great Basin region in the middle Cambrian.

Intensive data harvesting from published taxonomic literature reporting on the Marjum and Wheeler Formations yielded data to the generic level that was compared to the taxonomic data of publicly available specimens in various collections (most notably the Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas; the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University; and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History).

Discrepancies between the published and the sampled fossil record have implications not only for the deposits included in this study, but also for all lagerstätten with a published record. As a result, further analysis of the association between the bias present in taxonomic literature and the study of paleoecology is necessary to fully understand the breadth and diversity of prehistoric communities.