Macquarie University
Recent papers
Geographical, environmental and intrinsic biotic controls on Phanerozoic marine diversification. Palaeontology 53:1211-1235 (2010).
Fair sampling of taxonomic richness and unbiased estimation of origination and extinction rates. In J. Alroy and G. Hunt (eds.), Quantitative Methods in Paleobiology. Paleontological Society Papers 16:55-80 (2010).
The shifting balance of diversity among major marine animal groups. Science 329:1191-1194 (2010)
Speciation and extinction in the fossil record of North American mammals. Pp. 301-323 in R. Butlin, J. Bridle, and D. Schluter, (eds.), Speciation and Patterns of Diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009)
John Alroy is a Future Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he coordinates the Paleobiology Database and oversees the PaleoDB's annual training workshop. He prefers to speak in the third person only when this is amusing.
Back to first person. I am now a grownup and a very happy family man, as you can tell.
I think the PaleoDB's members will finish plugging in the entire fossil record any day now. I also think that someday the Mets will win the World Series. Some people say I am not very realistic. They are correct.
Overcited papers
Dynamics of origination and extinction in the marine fossil record. PNAS 105:11536-11542 (2008)
Phanerozoic trends in the global diversity of marine invertebrates. Science 321:97-100 (with 34 others: 2008)
Effects of sampling standardization on estimates of Phanerozoic marine diversification. PNAS 98(11):6261-6266 (with 24 others: 2001)
A multi-species overkill simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction. Science 292:1893-1896 (2001)
New methods for quantifying macroevolutionary patterns and processes. Paleobiology 26(4):707-733 (2000)
Cope's rule and the dynamics of body mass evolution in North American mammals. Science 280:731-734 (1998)
My main research focus is still on diversity curves, speciation, and extinction. Will I ever see the light at the end of the Phanerozoic? I develop methods to estimate these abstract numerical things and then apply said methods over and over again to Cenozoic North American mammals and Phanerozoic marine invertebrates.
My latest greatest is shareholder quorum subsampling. 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 PaleoDB's built-in diversity curve generator.
I also have projects going on body mass evolution, molecular clock calibration, and early childhood development. I maintain an interest in late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions, and as a young'un I worked on quantitative methods of time scale construction.
I am a graduate of Reed College and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Between 1994 and 1996 I was a post-doctoral fellow in the University of Arizona's Research Training Group in the Analysis of Biodiversification, which was affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Between 1996 and 1998 I had yet another post-doc with the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Paleobiology and Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems program. And between 1998 and 2010 I was a lost soul at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara.
If that's not enough, my CV gives all the gory details. And if you simply must know right now you can cast an e-mail into the ether using either one of these two very special addresses: <john dot alroy at mq dot edu dot au> or <alroy at nceas dot ucsb dot edu>.
Old papers I wish someone would read
Are Sepkoski's evolutionary faunas dynamically coherent? Evolutionary Ecology Research 6(1):1-32 (2004)
Taxonomic inflation and body mass distributions in North American fossil mammals. Journal of Mammalogy 84(2):431-443 (2003)
How many named species are valid? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99:3706-3711 (2002)
Putting North America's end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in context: large scale analyses of spatial patterns, extinction rates, and size distributions. Pp. 105-143 in R. D. E. MacPhee (ed.), Extinctions in near time: causes, contexts, and consequences. Plenum, New York (1999)
The fossil record of North American mammals: evidence for a Paleocene evolutionary radiation. Systematic Biology 48(1):107-118 (1999: perhaps read but certainly ignored by our molecular friends)
Alroy's Abbreviated Ten Statistical Commandments
Overarching themes
• Log thy data
• Life's but a gradient
• See the nonparametric light
• Disdain p-values
• Maximize a posteriori
Diversity curve variations
• Abhor tiny time series
• Difference thy time series
• Sample fairly, if not uniformly
• Count only thy sampled taxa
• The secret of life is... two timers