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. 2013 Feb 1;110(8):2904–2909. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208302110

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

Number of planktic foraminiferal taxa described from 1826 to 2001 (data from ref. 38). (A) Cumulative number of described species is plotted as a function of time. The curve is asymptotic, indicating that there remain few undescribed species as of 2001. (B) Statistical approach of Bebber et al. (39) is used to estimate the asymptotic number of species by fitting a function that describes how the annualized rate of discovery (y axis) varies in relation to the number of species already described (x axis). The estimated total number of species corresponds to the number of species at which the rate of species discovery is equal to 0. The line is a cubic function that was fitted to the data using ordinary-least-squares regression. The model predicts a total of 622 planktic Foraminifera taxa (95% CI: 598–625) with 598 taxa discovered as of 2001.