It is based on personal experience–ask anyone who has expertise in a taxon and/or fauna, and they will either 1. Be the person who fixed the data in PBDB from being error-filled, or 2. Wish they had time to make the data in PBDB better.
That’s true, but it still isn’t good at error-checking. It has data from 200-year old papers that hasn’t been updated, homonyms that have been conflated (like Chama striata Smith and C. striata Emmons), misidentifications inherited from papers, novel misspellings, etc., etc.
Yes, but I know enough about the layers that I work on to know that PBDB is not a good source for learning about their faunas.
The argument is that “using PBDB data is not a good way to do this type of study”, not “the person doing this study is stupid”. I have seen dozens of papers that got bad results because of using PBDB data with inadequate error-checking.
The problem is not that it shouldn’t sort fossils, it’s that it shouldn’t sort them in the patterns observed. For instances, a global flood should not consistently separate Chesapecten jeffersonius and Carolinapecten solarioides into different layers, as they lived in similar habitats and are similar shapes and sizes. What it should sort by is something like size or depth range, which bear almost no resemblance to patterns in fossil deposits as a whole. Completely un-size sorted deposits with repeated ups and downs in sea level (based on physiological requirements, sediment type, and stable isotope ratios) cannot have been moved after deposition significantly, nor deposited during a single flood event.