Re: Fastovsky vs Archibald

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:43:44 -0700 (PDT) Tim Donovan <uwrk2@yahoo.com>
writes:
>   Over the past 20 years there have been serious
> attempts to assess diversity at various levels within
> the Hell Creek and equivalents, by Fastovsky,
> Wroblewski etc.


I know nothing of Wroblewski's work (and I have been following Hell Creek
research for 15 years), but I consider myself an aficionado of
Fastovsky's pubs.  Fastovsky's group (for instance, in their 1991 paper
in _Science_ and their later papers) counted taxa mainly at the family
level.  Keep in mind that these workers usually have only isolated
elements to work with in such field studies.  Identifying elements only
down to family is convenient and expedient (although its not ideal) for
diversity studies.  And it is worthless for identifying stratigraphic
ranges of individual species.

If someone could provide me with a specific reference to a *statistical*
study that shows *species*-level (or genus-level) extinction within the
Hell Creek Formation, then I may change my opinion on the matter.  But
non-statistics-based papers on this subject are essentially
heresay/anecdotal.  And absence of evidence does not necessarily imply
evidence of absence.

<pb>
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