title: Preservation of species abundance in marine death assemblages.
abstract: Fossil assemblages of skeletal material are thought to differ from their source live communities, particularly in relative abundance of species, owing to potential bias from postmortem transport and time-averaging of multiple generations. However, statistical meta-analysis of 85 marine molluscan data sets indicates that, although sensitive to sieve mesh-size and environment, time-averaged death assemblages retain a strong signal of species' original rank orders. Naturally accumulated death assemblages thus provide a reliable means of acquiring the abundance data that are key to a new generation of paleobiologic and macroecologic questions and to extending ecological time-series via sedimentary cores.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 5734 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 USA. skidwell@midway.uchicago.edu
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Kidwell
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018533:Biomass; D016208:Databases, Factual; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005580:Fossils; D019015:Geologic Sediments; D008974:Mollusca; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012623:Seawater; D013223:Statistics as Topic