Figure 2. Relationship of estimated temporal range or density [ETD] of a taxon to its observed temporal range or density [OTD], expressed as a function of the number of independent samples n found in OTD, for critical likelihood l = 0.05. Note that ETD is 20 × OTD for n = 2 (exceeding OTD by 1900%), but this proportion falls rapidly to less than 2 × OTD when n = 6 (exceeding OTD by 82.1%) and less than 1.1 × OTD when n = 33 (exceeding OTD by only 9.8%). For values of sample size n considered in applications here, n = 42 and n = 56, differences in ETD are insensitive to small changes in n (addition or subtraction of a sample changes the difference between ETD and OTD by 0.002 to 0.001 or 0.2 to 0.1%).