Supplementary file 1_A hundred years of dinosaur research in Mexico: skeletal completeness and phylogenetic information of the dinosaur fossil record in Mexico.docx

The estimator is developed as a cross product between a skeletal completeness metric and a character coverage metric that can produce absolute values or be ranked relative to every element of the database. This estimator, named here as phylogenetic estimator (pê), reflects the status of distribution of hypotheses of homologies assigned to specific groups. Although it would be expected that two random variables (skeletal completeness and character coverage) behave in a chaotic and non-linear manner, they reflect more covariance with each other and show strong correlation.

High skeletal completeness values produce a leverage effect making the linear regression consistent with the intuition that more complete specimens are more informative. After removing the high skeletal completeness, the two variables become more disjointed with low skeletal completeness scores, suggesting that fragmentary remains can still be potentially informative. The estimator pê applied to the Mexican dinosaur fossil record behaves according to the geological framework and shows potential in capturing information related to the local depositional environment.

When performing data wrangling, there is a general intuition that fragmentary remains are less informative than complete specimens, and data tends to be disregarded based on this assumption. From the point of view of database management in the age of big data, the estimator pê enables communicating first-hand observers, those in contact with the material, with the users who will work on the data in the future, finding gaps in the literature and having more objective criteria to discard occurrence data, connecting the physical with the abstracted fossil record.</p>