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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

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The Paleobiology Database originated in the NCEAS-funded Phanerozoic Marine Paleofaunal Database initiative, which operated from August 1998 through August 2000. From 2000 to 2015, PBDB received funding from the National Science Foundation. PBDB also received support form the Australian Research Council. From 2000 to 2010 it was housed at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis,[1] a cross-disciplinary research center within the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is currently housed at 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

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Partial list of contributing researchers:[2]

Criticism

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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

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  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.
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