Crystalised- The Xx

This post is not an update.  This post is a guide for all you Geologists (or Geologists' assistants) out there wondering how in the heck to create a rarefaction in PAST, let this be a tutorial.

My boss asked me to make her some rarefactions for her beds in Australia, so I had to figure out how to do it.  Well, of course, there's no tutorials for PAST online, so I had to figure it out myself (with a little help from the results of a past rarefaction).

So if you have an excel sheet with multiple taxa, tally how many of each taxa you have.  

For instance, I have a bed with 14 Dickinsonia, 57 Wigwamia, 35 Tribrachidium, and 5 Aspidella.  Place these tally numbers in the A column.  The numbered rows in PAST each represent a new taxa.  After inputing your data, you should have a table that looks like 1-14, 2-57, 3-35, 4-5.  Highlight the A column and click "individual rarefaction" under "diversity".  You should get a new table listing three columns: sample size, taxa, and stdev (standard deviation).  The sample size should continue through the number of specimens  you have total (in the example case I've presented, it would be 111).  The taxa should total the number of different taxa you have (in the example situation, it's 4).  Click the "graph" button and it should graph it for you.  

Hope this helps!