sepkoski is a data R package of Sepkoski’s fossil marine
animal genera compendium (Sepkoski, 2002), ported from Shanan Peters’ online database.
The aim of sepkoski is to provide a light and
easily-accessible solution to working with Sepkoski’s compendium to
support teaching exercises. The package provides access to:
sepkoski_raw Sepkoski’s raw fossil marine animal genera
compendium (Sepkoski, 2002).sepkoski Sepkoski’s compendium with first and last
appearance intervals updated to be consistent with stages from the International
Geological Time Scale 2022.interval_table A table linking intervals in Sepkoski’s
compendium with the International
Geological Time Scale 2022.Note: In updating interval names, some interpretation was required.
The interval_table dataset documents the linked interval
names. If you notice any issue, or disagree with any of these
assignments, please feel free to raise a GitHub issue, and I will do my
best to address them as soon as possible.
The development version of sepkoski can be installed via
GitHub using:
# Install development version of the package
devtools::install_github("LewisAJones/sepkoski")# Load library
library(sepkoski)The datasets in sepkoski can be easily accessed via:
# Raw dataset
data("sepkoski_raw")
# Updated interval dataset
data("sepkoski")
# Interval table
data("interval_table")The only function in the sepkoski package at this time
is sepkoski_curve(). This can be used to plot Sepkoski’s
evolutionary fauna (Sepkoski, 1981) using the Sepkoski (2002) fossil
marine animal genera compendium. Users may provide their own values to
function arguments to customise the appearance, or simply use the
default arguments:
sepkoski_curve()
Sepkoski, J. J. (1981). A factor analytic description of the Phanerozoic marine fossil record. Paleobiology, 7(1), pp. 36-53.
Sepkoski, J. J. (2002). A compendium of fossil marine animal genera. Bulletins of American paleontology, 363, pp. 1-560.
Peters, S. (2022). Sepkoski’s Online Genus Database.