“The purpose of this vignette is to guide users through the basic capabilities of the ‘divDyn’ package. Fossil occurrence databases, such as the Paleobiology Database (PaleoDB, http://www.paleobiodb.org/, http://fossilworks.org) are readily available to be used in analyses of diversity, extinction and origination patterns (the dynamics of biodiversity), with a certain toolkit that has become standard since the creation of the database. Until now, the implementation of most of these tools have been the responsibilities of individual researchers, with no software package to rely on. This R package intends to fill this gap” PDF download