Computers read the fossil record.

The article discusses the use of software to construct fossil databases directly from research papers by paleontologist Shanan Peters and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Topics include data scientist Chris Ré's development of the text-mining software DeepDive, a comparison of the human-generated Paleobiology Database to a computer-generated database created using custom Paleo DeepDive software, and limitations set by publishers on how results of text mining are published.