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Conservationists make surprisingly little use of the extensive records of extinction of taxa in the fossil record. Tietje and Roedel (2018) make use of fossil-based models to predict the extinction risk of living species of amphibians. Data for 354 extinct taxa were obtained from the Paleobiology Database and for living taxa from AmphibiaWeb and IUCN Red Lists. A fossil-calibrated model predicted durations of living amphibians in succession from Least Concern (LC) to Extinct (EX). LC species have a median predicted duration twice that of Near Threatened (NT) species and four times that of other IUCN categories. Importantly, Data Deficient (DD) species were predicted to have a median duration that was most similar to that of Critically Endangered (CR). Unfortunately, in excess of one quarter of all amphibians, including most recently named taxa, are considered to be DD.
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