As a validation exercise, the model was also fitted to the curve for accumulated virus families from 1954 using the same methods, except that the Poisson approximation no longer holds, so a binomial distribution was used. A family (based on current ICTV classifications) was added to the total when the first post-1954 species was allocated to that family. We tested the assumption that species can be randomly assigned to families (weighted by the size of the families) by noting the number of years in which 0, 1, 2, etc. virus families were discovered. This was done one million times to obtain a distribution for comparison with the observed values.