Summarize taxon age from PBDB to just a single min and max age

This uses the Paleobiology Database's API to gather information on the ages for all specimens of a taxon. It will also look for all descendants of the taxon. It fixes name misspellings if possible. It is basically a wrapper for get_fossil_range.

Usage

summarize_fossil_range(taxon, recent = FALSE, assume_recent_if_missing = TRUE)

Arguments

taxon: The scientific name of the taxon you want the range of occurrences of
recent: If TRUE, forces the minimum age to be zero
assume_recent_if_missing: If TRUE, any taxon missing from pbdb is assumed to be recent

Value

a single row data.frame of max_ma and min_ma for the specimens, with rowname equal to taxon input