Yaowu Xing and colleagues (Maria A. Gandolfo, Renske E. Onstein, David J. Cantrill, 
Bonnie F. Jacobs, Gregory J. Jordan, Daphne E. Lee, Svetlana Popova, Rashmi Srivastava,Tao Su, Sergei V. Vikulin, Atsushi Yabe, and H. Peter Linder) just published an article presenting the CAD (Cenozoic Angiosperm Database): Testing the Biases in the Rich Cenozoic Angiosperm Macrofossil Record in International Journal of Plant Sciences. The database is available from http://www.fossil-cad.net/.
The angiosperms currently have approximately 350,000 species, but how have angiosperms achieved such a high diversity? This question has bothered evolutionary biologists for centuries. The fossil database allows us to understand diversity changes in the past. Especially for angiosperms little is known about the temporal dynamics of species, lineage diversification and richness. It is structured by site (geographical information for each fossil assemblage), geology (name, age, epoch and stages of the formation), taxon (identification reliability and nearest living relatives of each taxon) and taxonomy. We hope that researchers will use the database to understand macro-evolutionary processes in angiosperms – possibly combining data from the database with inferences made from molecular phylogenetics.
For any questions concerning the database, contact Yaowu: yxing (at) fieldmuseum.org.
Onstein is ON 