Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology

The advent of large, publicly accessible sources of data relevant to paleobiology has opened new avenues for quantifying large-scale patterns in the history of life and for identifying their underlying causes. How and why has biodiversity changed over time? What factors control evolutionary trends within clades? How have environmental changes affected the evolution of life? In this course, we will introduce several of the most widely accessed sources of data for paleobiological analysis, such as the Paleobiology Database and Macrostrat, develop techniques for downloading and cleaning these data, and then explore several of the most commonly used statistical techniques in paleobiology, including phylogenetic analysis, phylogenetic regression and model fitting, logistic regression, ordination, and subsampling to analyze these data.