Welcome to Palaeoverse

A resource hub and community space for Palaeobiologists

Palaeoverse is an initiative which aims to bring the palaeobiology community together to share resources, reach agreed standards, and improve reproducibility in palaeobiological research.

🚨LECTURE SERIES🚨

Our toolkits

palaeoverse provides functionality to support data preparation and exploration for palaeobiological analyses, improving code reproducibility and accessibility. The aim of the palaeoverse R package is to bring the palaeobiological community together to establish agreed standards.

install.packages("palaeoverse")

rmacrostrat provides streamlined and improved accessibility to the geological database Macrostrat. The package provides functionality for querying the database via the dedicated API and retrieving various geological data (e.g. lithostratigraphic units) and definitions/metadata associated with those data and Macrostrat more broadly.

install.packages("rmacrostrat")

rphylopic allows users to add silhouettes of organisms from the PhyloPic website to plots generated in base R and ggplot2. rphylopic was originally developed and maintained by Scott Chamberlain. From ver. 1.0.0, the package is now developed and maintained by the Palaeoverse team.

install.packages("rphylopic")

sepkoski provides access to Sepkoski’s fossil marine animal genera compendium (Sepkoski, 2002). The aim of the package is to offer a light and easily-accessible solution to working with Sepkoski’s compendium to support teaching exercises.

install.packages("sepkoski")

Our Resources

Cheat sheets

It can be a lot to take in when trying to get familiar with a new R package. We provide cheat sheets for our packages to help get you started.

CRAN Task View

CRAN Task View is a catalogue of R packages that are specifically geared towards acquiring, cleaning, visualising, and/or analysing various kinds of palaeontological and palaeontology-adjacent data. We use this venue to showcase the wide variety of R packages available across the palaeosciences and to provide a brief overview of each package for a broad audience of R users.

Grant Track

Grant Track is an online community database of research funding schemes and grants for Palaeobiologists. This framework is provided to support the community in easily keeping track of available funding opportunities.

External resources

We have created a table of external resources to help the community to find relevant R and palaeobiological resources.

Community spaces

Google group

We host a community space for palaeobiologists using the Google Groups platform. This space provides an area to share ideas and resources, advertise opportunities, and network with colleagues in an informal setting. Questions related to Palaeoverse packages are also more than welcome.

Bluesky

We are active on Bluesky, where we share updates and news on Palaeoverse, as well as resources for the palaeobiology community. We are also more than happy to help circulate relevant news you wish to share with the community, just remember to tag @palaeoverse.bsky.social and use the hashtag #palaeoverse.

Get involved

We welcome both code and non-code contributions. You can contribute in the following ways:

R packages 👩🏽‍💻

Contribute to functionality available in Palaeoverse R Packages, such as palaeoverse, rmacrostrat, and rphylopic. Jump to toolkits…

Review 🔍

Become a Palaeoverse Reviewer - Review code, documentation, and resources. We believe community input is key to improving user experience!

Data 🗃

Contribute to Palaeoverse databases such as the Directory and Grant Track. These databases aim to centralise useful information for the community.

Community 💬

Be active in community spaces such as the Palaeoverse Google Group, an area to share ideas and resources, advertise opportunities, and network with colleagues.

About us

We are an international group of Early Career Researchers with the aim of encouraging more open, reproducible and collaborative research in palaeobiology. To do so, we provide tools and resources–developed alongside the community–that help to promote this culture.