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Lyons et al. reply

Nature volume 538, pages E3–E4 (2016)Cite this article

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replying to R. J. Telford et al. Nature 538, 10.1038/nature20096 (2016)

In the accompanying Comment1, Telford et al. claim that many of the modern datasets we used previously2were inappropriate for the analysis, and that the pattern through time is uninteresting and probably the result of differences in sample size (number of sites in each data set). We find their criticisms to be flawed for several reasons.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 20013, USA

    S. Kathleen Lyons, Antoine Bercovici, William DiMichele, Conrad Labandeira, Silvia Pineda-Munoz, Anikó Tóth & Scott Wing

  2. Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, 45221, Ohio, USA

    Joshua H. Miller

  3. Department of Environmental Science and Biology, The College at Brockport – SUNY, Brockport, 14420, New York, USA

    Kathryn L. Amatange

  4. School of Natural Sciences, University of California, Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, 95343, California, USA

    Anna K. Behrensmeyer & Jessica L. Blois

  5. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Matt Davis

  6. Department of Anthropology, Hominid Paleobiology Doctoral Program, Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, George Washington University, Washington DC, 20052, USA

    Andrew Du, David Patterson & Amelia Villaseñor

  7. Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Jussi T. Eronen

  8. School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072, Australia

    J. Tyler Faith

  9. Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 20013, USA

    Gary R. Graves

  10. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 2100, Denmark

    Gary R. Graves

  11. Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, 32611, Florida, USA

    Nathan Jud

  12. Department of Entomology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, 20742, USA

    Conrad Labandeira

  13. Key Lab of Insect Evolution and Environmental Changes, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

    Conrad Labandeira

  14. Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Cindy V. Looy

  15. School Biology and Ecology & Sustainability Solutions Initiative, University of Maine, Orono, 04469, Maine, USA

    Brian McGill

  16. Department of Anthropology, Human Origins Program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 20013, USA

    Richard Potts

  17. School of Life Sciences, University of Nevada–Las Vegas, Las Vegas, 89154, Nevada, USA

    Brett Riddle

  18. Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97731, Oregon, USA

    Rebecca Terry

  19. Chair of Ecology and Biogeography, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Lwowska 1, Torun, 87-100, Poland

    Werner Ulrich

  20. Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 20150, South Africa

    Heidi Anderson & John Anderson

  21. Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, 05405, Vermont, USA

    Nicholas J. Gotelli

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  1. S. Kathleen Lyons
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  28. Nicholas J. Gotelli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. Kathleen Lyons.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Results from subsetting analyses rarefying to 20 sites instead of 10 as done by Telford et al.1

a–d, Datasets are US desert rodents (a), Holocene mammals (b), 1,000-year-old North American pollen (c) and 1950 Wisconsin understory vegetation (d). Lines indicate a significant linear regression at P < 0.05. Panels without lines are non-significant.

Extended Data Figure 2 Box plots showing the number of sites and proportion of aggregated species pars with the data stratified into three groups: Deep Time (>1 million years ago Ma; n = 29 data sets), Shallow Time (1 million–100 years ago; n = 24), and Modern (<100 years ago; n = 46).

Deep Time and Modern datasets each differ significantly in the number of sites compared to Shallow time, but Deep Time and Modern datasets do not differ significantly from one another (left; P = 0.37). By contrast, there is a significant difference between Deep Time and Modern datasets in the proportion of aggregated species pairs (P < 0.01). Even if there is an effect of sample size on pairs analysis, it cannot explain our previous findings2

Extended Data Table 1 Results of break-point analysis and ANOVAs showing a consistent difference in the proportion of aggregated pairs in modern versus fossil data sets and a consistent Holocene break point
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Data

This file contains the Supplementary Data. (XLSX 73 kb)

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Lyons, S., Miller, J., Amatange, K. et al. Lyons et al. reply. Nature 538, E3–E4 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20097

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