v1.0.0

paleobioDB 1.0.0

This new major version of the paleobioDB package uses a new API version. It is possible that code written for previous versions might not be compatible. If you need to run older code, you might have to rewrite it or to install an older version of the package.

New features

• Update to API version 1.2 (#51, #57).

• The new functions pbdb_specimen(), pbdb_specimens(), pbdb_ref_specimens(), and pbdb_measurements() can be used to get information about fossil specimens and measurements associated with them.

• The new functions pbdb_opinion(), pbdb_opinions() and pbdb_opinions_taxa() can be used to get information about taxonomic opinions.

Minor improvements

• Methods from package terra (instead of raster) are used in functions that plot and return raster objects.

• Function and argument names consistently use snake case now, so some argument names have been changed (e.g. the do.plot parameter available in many plotting functions has been renamed to do_plot).

• Query functions warn the user when no records are returned.

• Query functions report warnings generated by the API instead of silently ignoring them.

• In pbdb_map_richness(), pbdb_richness(), and pbdb_orig_ext(), there is now an option to provide a title or a label for the y axis.

Bug fixes

• In the pbdb_temp_range() plot, taxa names are now more readable (#22).

• pbdb_richness() prevents x axis title from overlapping with tick labels if these are long (#43).

• Fix bug in map plotting caused by latitude and longitude values being returned as strings by the API (#50).

• Fix a certificate issue in RCurl that affected Windows users (#53, #54).

paleobioDB 0.4

We updated the functions of the package in order to use the revised taxonomy in paleobiology Database. Now richness plots and new occurrences and last occurrences plots are based on matched_name and matched_number fields.

paleobioDB 0.1

We have developed paleobioDB 0.1, an R-package designed to make easy and flexible queries of the Paleobiology Database, as well as to visualize, download and process the selected data. This package will make it easy to access paleontological data in a way that should allow those data to be further analyzed, including via other packages and libraries available in R.