Abstract

A correlation exists between the quality of the rock record palaeontologists have to sample on land and the diversity of fossils recorded from that rock record. However, whether this arises as a direct effect of sampling bias or because a third factor (sea-level change) has driven both in parallel remains the subject of much debate. The rock record in the deep ocean basins has accumulated under a different set of biases to that on land and thus provides a simple way of testing the two competing hypotheses. By comparing the diversity of a widespread group of marine microplankton (coccolithophorids) recovered from land and deep-sea rock records it is possible to establish the strength of the rock record bias and to then discover the underlying biological signal common to both.