Highlights:
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The way we measure entities can have significant downstream effects on the transformations we can employ and the analytical methods we can use without breaking the link between the measurement and the aspect of reality they represent.
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Despite its obvious importance in any quantitative science, measurement theory is currently underused in biological research, including paleobiology.
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Proper statistical analysis is invaluable for extracting knowledge from data, but statistical models are blind to measurement theoretical issues because they can be applied to any dataset that fulfills their assumptions regarding the distributional properties of the data.
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Enhanced awareness of how distinct types of measurements possess different properties can improve the quality of scientific inquiry and lead to more meaningful inferences about the empirical world, including the fossil record.
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