Species discovery and dental ecometrics: good news, bad news and recommendations for the future

Datasets for Wilson et al 2022: Species discovery and dental ecometrics: good news, bad news and recommendations for the future which estimates the number of large mammalian herbivores that remain undescribed and tests the hypothesis that the incompleteness of the modern record should have an effect on community descriptors, with dental ecometrics used as an example. We found that there remain at least 84 undescribed large mammal species, and that these species are not evenly distributed, with the largest remaining diversity to be found within primates, artiodactyls and marsupials, especially those living in the Neotropic and Afrotropic realms.

We found that until about 40% completeness, the number of species described has a big impact on both trait averages and estimates of climate, but beyond this point, climate estimates are stable to futher descriptions.