For over 50 years, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have revolutionized fields within the earth sciences. Although scientific ocean ...drilling (SOD) data are openly available following each expedition, the formats for these data are heterogeneous. Furthermore, lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data are typically separated into different repositories, limiting researchers' abilities to discover and analyze integrated SOD data sets. Emphasis within Earth Sciences on Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) Data Principles and the establishment of community‐led databases provide a pathway to unite SOD data and further harness the scientific potential of the investments made in offshore drilling. Here, we describe a workflow for compiling, cleaning, and standardizing key SOD records, and importing them into the Paleobiology Database and Macrostrat, systems with versatile, open data distribution mechanisms. These efforts are being carried out by the extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project. eODP has processed all of the lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data from one SOD repository, along with numerous other data sets that were never deposited in a database; these were manually transcribed from original reports. This compiled data set contains over 79,899 lithological units from 1,125 drilling holes from 422 sites. Over 26,000 fossil‐bearing samples, with 5,378 taxonomic entries from 13 biological groups, are placed within this lithologic spatiotemporal framework. All information is available via GitHub and Macrostrat's application programming interface, which renders data retrievable by a variety of parameters, including age, site, and lithology.
Key Points
Scientific ocean drilling has produced vast amounts of data; however, they are not archived in a way that meets the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data principles
The extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits project standardizes lithology, paleontology, and age data across decades of drilling programs
This project has migrated data sets to existing, open‐access, searchable databases to enable scientific research
Microfossils have a ubiquitous and well‐studied fossil record with temporally and spatially fluctuating diversity, but how this arises and how major events affect speciation and extinction is ...uncertain. We present one of the first applications of PyRate to a micropalaeontological global occurrence dataset, reconstructing diversification rates within a Bayesian framework from the Mesozoic to the Neogene in four microfossil groups: planktic foraminiferans, calcareous nannofossils, radiolarians and diatoms. Calcareous and siliceous groups demonstrate opposed but inconsistent responses in diversification. Radiolarian origination increases from c. 104 Ma, maintaining high rates into the Cenozoic. Calcareous microfossil diversification rates significantly declines across the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary, while rates in siliceous microfossil groups remain stable until the Paleocene–Eocene transition. Diversification rates in the Cenozoic are largely stable in calcareous groups, whereas the Palaeogene is a turbulent time for diatoms. Diversification fluctuations are driven by climate change and fluctuations in sea surface temperatures, leading to different responses in the groups generating calcareous or siliceous microfossils. Extinctions are apparently induced by changes in anoxia, acidification and stratification; speciation tends to be associated with upwelling, productivity and ocean circulation. These results invite further micropalaeontological quantitative analysis and study of the effects of major transitions in the fossil record. Despite extensive occurrence data, regional diversification events were not recovered; neither were some global events. These unexpected results show the need to consider multiple spatiotemporal levels of diversity and diversification analyses and imply that occurrence datasets of different clades may be more appropriate for testing some hypotheses than others.
