Historical, sampling and gender bias in palaeontological collections: Stylophora (Echinodermata) as a case study

• Main Authors: Guenser, Pauline, Lefebvre, Bertrand
• Other Authors: Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon - Terre, Planètes, Environnement (LGL-TPE), École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon)-Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (UCBL), Université de Lyon-Université de Lyon-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne (UJM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Bertrand Lefebvre, Thomas Saucède
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2023
• Subjects: [SDU]Sciences of the Universe [physics]; [SDU.STU.PG]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Earth Sciences/Paleontology; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04271133; https://hal.science/hal-04271133/document; https://hal.science/hal-04271133/file/Guenser%20et%20al.%20ECE11_HAL.pdf

The class Stylophora corresponds to a relatively small clade of extinct echinoderms (around 130 species and 70 genera) known from the middle Cambrian (Wuliuan) to the Late Carboniferous (Bashkirian). From their first descriptions in the 1850s (Billings, 1858; Hall, 1859) to the 1950s, stylophorans were almost exclusively described from Europe and North America. We analysed an extensive data set that includes all stylophoran species, the publication year and the location of the holotypes, the nationality and the gender of the taxonomists who described them. Based on multivariate statistics analyses, we assessed two main biases. First, although stylophoran occurrences have been documented from all continents except Antarctica for the last 75 years, our knowledge of this class remains strongly biased historically. Indeed, about 75% of all described taxa are from only four countries (France, Czech Republic, USA, and UK). Moreover, prolific countries (e.g., Morocco) do not have holotypes registered in their public collections, although the material was discovered in their territory. Second, although female geologists sometimes contributed extensively to fieldwork and the discovery of new taxa (the most famous example being Mrs Elizabeth Gray, after whom Cothurnocystis elizae Bather, 1913 was named), only a single species was described by a female palaeontologist, "Phyllocystis" salairica by Yulia Dubatulova (in Rozova et al., 1985). We might explain this pattern with parachute palaeontology (or scientific colonialism). The impact of colonialism on biodiversity study in deep time has been recently approached in the litterature (