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Testing the effect of the rock record on diversity: a multidisciplinary approach to elucidating the generic richness of sauropodomorph dinosaurs through time.

This paper presents the most up-to-date data set on the stratigraphic and geographic distributions of sauropodomorph dinosaurs (a major group of herbivorous organisms during the Mesozoic Era). These data were used to generate detailed diversity curves for this group, based on several different methods for taking into account uneven sampling of the fossil record. This paper is thus significant because of its implications for sauropodomorph evolutionary history. It also provides support for a major decrease in diversity at the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary - a phenomenon that had been noted previously, but which was normally attributed to poor sampling in the Early Cretaceous. Finally, this study provided the first comparisons of diversity curves based on different methods such as subsampling and rock modelling. As a result, this work has relevance to a much wider audience than just dinosaur palaeontologists and has thus been cited in recent discussions of geological and anthropogenic sampling biases in the fossil record. This work reports the results from Mannion's PhD project which was proposed and supervised by Upchurch. Upchurch's contribution to this paper is approximately 35% including data collection, analysis, interpretation of results and writing /editing of text.