Paleonet: Trilobite authorities questions

[John Alroy]

All:

Just to clarify, despite the fact that overall we now have 259,000  
authority and classification opinions on 119,000 taxonomic names, the  
PaleoDB's trilobite taxonomy in particular is weak.

We have baseline to pretty good data for the following high-level  
groups, going right down to the species level: Anthozoa,  
Rostroconchia, Bivalvia, Gastropoda, Cephalopoda, Hyolitha,  
Brachiopoda, Asterozoa, Chondrichthyes, and most tetrapods. But for  
others we are still mostly relying upon Sepkoski's Compendium  
classification of 35,000 genera: said trilobites, Foraminiferida,  
Porifera, Demospongea, Ostracoda, Malacostraca, Crinoidea,  
Echinoidea, Bryozoa, Polychaeta, Graptolithina, Conodonta, and  
Actinopterygii. Our plant and insect taxonomies also have a long way  
to go.

So, does anyone want to step up to the plate here? Here are the  
instructions for getting a data entry account:

http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl? 
user=Guest&action=displayPage&page=join_us

Cheers,

John Alroy
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101-3351
phone: (805) 892-2070
FAX: (805) 892-2510
e-mail: alroy at nceas.ucsb.edu