John Alroy

TL;DR: In this paper, a new data set of fossil occurrences representing 3.5 million specimens was presented, and it was shown that global and local diversity was less than twice as high in the Neogene as in the mid-Paleozoic.

TL;DR: A computer simulation of North American end-Pleistocene human and large herbivore population dynamics correctly predicts the extinction or survival of 32 out of 41 prey species.

TL;DR: A new database of this kind for the Phanerozoic fossil record of marine invertebrates is introduced and four substantially distinct analytical methods that estimate taxonomic diversity by quantifying and correcting for variation through time in the number and nature of inventories are applied.

TL;DR: Body mass estimates for 1534 North American fossil mammal species show that new species are on average 9.1% larger than older species in the same genera, which partially explains the unwavering lower size limit and the gradually expanding mid-sized gap.

TL;DR: The discipline-wide effort to database the fossil record at the occurrence level has made it possible to estimate marine invertebrate extinction and origination rates with much greater accuracy, and shows that two biotic mechanisms have hastened recoveries from mass extinctions and confined diversity to a relatively narrow range over the past 500 million years.