ON HOW DATABASE RECORDS OF PLANT AND ANIMAL FOSSILS ARE DIFFERENT: PITFALLS THAT DATABASE RESEARCHERS SHOULD BE AWARE OF

Online databases of botanical records of living and fossil plants provide opportunities for researchers to conduct broad-scale analyses without the time, funding, permission, and manpower constraints required for fieldwork or new analysis from existing collections. However, the results of studies reliant upon databases are only as trustworthy as the data incorporated. Paleobotanical data are often different from paleozoological data in several notable ways: first, organs are often preserved separately, and consequently given separate taxonomic names. Incorporating each organ individually in measures of diversity could lead to overestimations of diversity in epochs/successions where the taxa have been well described. Second, paleobotanists are more confident assigning younger (i.e., Cenozoic) fossils to living taxa than older (i.e., Palaeozoic or Mesozoic) fossils; consequently, older fossils often have different names from morphologically identical younger fossils. Modern paleobotanists are also less eager to assign fossils to living genera based purely on gross visual similarity than past paleobotanists. Third, again because of uncertainty surrounding morphology, similar fossils collected from different regions representing the same plant, can be given different names.

We here review selected studies from the published literature that use the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) as a source of paleobotanical data in synthetic analyses. Some of the authors of these papers applied appropriate caution concerning the aforementioned pitfalls and thus produce trustworthy results. Others do not consider the biases imposed by paleobotanical data and take the PBDB records at face value, and thus produce misleading results, among them extinction and radiation events that are not real, temporal ranges of fossil taxa in excess of what is probable, and other issues. We summarize problems that arise from these misunderstandings of paleobotanical data, and make suggestions for future scientists, both for paleozoologists interested in using paleobotanical data, and for managers of databases containing paleobotanical data.