General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: Abstract: Variation in preservation and sampling probability clouds our estimates of past biodiversity. The most extreme examples are Lagerst€ atten faunas and floras. Although such deposits provide a wealth of information and represent true richness better than other deposits, they can create misleading

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... peaks because of their species richness. Here, we investigate how Lagerst€ atten formations add to time series of vertebrate richness in the UK, Germany and China. The first two nations are associated with wellstudied fossil records and the last is a country where palaeontology has a much shorter history; all three nations include noted Lagerst€ atten in their fossil records. Lagerst€ atten provide a larger proportion of China's sampled richness than in Germany or the UK, despite comprising a smaller proportion of its fossiliferous deposits. The proportions of taxa that are unique to Lagerst€ atten vary through time and between countries. Further, in all regions, we find little overlap between the taxa occurring in Lagerst€ atten and in 'ordinary' formations within the same time bin, indicating that Lagerst€ atten preserve unusual faunas. As expected, fragile taxa make up a greater proportion of richness in Lagerst€ atten than the remainder of the fossil record. Surprisingly, we find that Lagerst€ atten account for a minority of peaks in the palaeodiversity curves of all vertebrates (18% in the UK; 36% in Germany and China), and Lagerst€ atten count is generally not a good overall predictor of the palaeodiversity signal. Vastly different sampling probabilities through taxa, locations and time require serious consideration when analysing palaeodiversity curves.