What Are We Really Counting When We Enumerate Species?

The interest in understanding the controls on biodiversity has grown rapidly in the recent years, in parallel with the growing concern of natural conservation as a result of an accelerating extinction rates of modern species. The recent unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography suggests that the neutral drift of species abundances predominantly control biodiversity instead of the more mainstream perspective that the total number of available ecological niches controls species richness. The theory predicts that the shape of species abundance distribution can determine the mode of speciation within metacommunities. Here I determine if empirical data from the Middle Devonian Hamilton Group fits a logseries or zero-sum multinomial distribution to test the generality of the theory within the fossil record.