John Alroy

Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney, where I oversee the Ecological Register, Fossilworks, and the annual analytical palaeobiology workshop.

Research Interest

My research focus for many years was diversity curves, speciation, and extinction, with most of my publications being about Cenozoic North American mammals or (under duress) Phanerozoic marine invertebrates. But I have finally seen the light at the end of the Phanerozoic and turned my attention to quantifying diversity and extinction at this very moment. My latest greatest inspirations are the gap filler turnover rate equations, the creeping-shadow-of-a-doubt Bayesian extinction probability equation (say that a few times fast), the rescaled Forbes index, the agnostic equation, the double geometric distribution, the λ5 index, and multiton subsampling. But before that came shareholder quorum subsampling, which is making a big splash in ecology under a different name and attributed to different authors. Try running it on your ecological count data with this simple R function - if you dare. And for the more ambitious, there's always the option of downloading the fossil record of everything and crunching it to smithereens with the Fossilworks built-in diversity curve generator.