bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.16.452692; this version posted July 16, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 Generating and testing hypotheses about the 2 fossil record of insect herbivory with a 3 theoretical ecospace 1,* 1 1 2,3,4 4 Sandra R. Schachat , Jonathan L. Payne , C. Kevin Boyce , Conrad C. Labandeira 5 1. Department of Geological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States 6 2. Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 7 DC, United States 8 3. Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, United States 9 4. College of Life Sciences, Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China 10 * Author for correspondence:
[email protected] 11 Abstract 12 A typical fossil flora examined for insect herbivory contains a few hundred leaves and a dozen or two 13 insect damage types. Paleontologists employ a wide variety of metrics to assess differences in herbivory 14 among assemblages: damage type diversity, intensity (the proportion of leaves, or of leaf surface area, 15 with insect damage), the evenness of diversity, and comparisons of the evenness and diversity of the flora 16 to the evenness and diversity of damage types. Although the number of metrics calculated is quite large, 17 given the amount of data that is usually available, the study of insect herbivory in the fossil record still 18 lacks a quantitative framework that can be used to distinguish among different causes of increased insect 19 herbivory and to generate null hypotheses of the magnitude of changes in insect herbivory over time.