Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

Dean, Christopher D.; Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro; Maidment, Susannah C. R.

doi:10.1111/pala.12492

Cited by 30 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 101 publications

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“…Nevertheless, even among these broadly consilient results, differences in reported pattern still require investigation. For example, Brusatte et al [3] and Dean et al [28] rejected a global long-term decline prior to the K-Pg boundary but found evidence for declines in species-richness and disparity at the end of the Cretaceous, Lloyd [30] found a long-term decline in sauropod and ornithischian diversity through the Cretaceous, and Barrett et al [12] recovered evidence for negative trends in theropod and ornithischian diversity during the last two stages of the Cretaceous but identified a radiation of Late Cretaceous sauropodomorphs. These differing results highlight the need to increase the density and spatio-temporal scope of taxon sampling for these clades and to combine detailed, stratigraphically controlled, regional-level analyses to provide a truly holistic picture of the biotic changes that occurred during this critical interval.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Brusatte et al . [ 3 ] and Dean et al [ 28 ] rejected a global long-term decline prior to the K-Pg boundary but found evidence for declines in species-richness and disparity at the end of the Cretaceous, Lloyd [ 30 ] found a long-term decline in sauropod and ornithischian diversity through the Cretaceous, and Barrett et al . [ 12 ] recovered evidence for negative trends in theropod and ornithischian diversity during the last two stages of the Cretaceous but identified a radiation of Late Cretaceous sauropodomorphs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reconstruction of past diversity patterns is difficult, as the 'raw' patterns of taxonomic diversity gleaned from the fossil record are subject to many hierarchical biases, ranging from initial fossilization potential, through the availability of fossiliferous rock outcrop, to anthropic collection biases (e.g. [23][24][25][26][27][28], also see [29]). Different methods have been applied in attempts to correct for these factors, including subsampling techniques (rarefaction, shareholder quorum subsampling and TRiPs) and comparisons of diversity with collections-related proxies (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundary

et al. 2020

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Determining the tempo and mode of non-avian dinosaur extinction is one of the most contentious issues in palaeobiology. Extensive disagreements remain over whether their extinction was catastrophic and geologically instantaneous or the culmination of long-term evolutionary trends. These conflicts have arisen due to numerous hierarchical sampling biases in the fossil record and differences in analytical methodology, with some studies identifying long-term declines in dinosaur richness prior to the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary and others proposing continued diversification. Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models to assess the fit of 12 dinosaur phylogenies to three speciation models (null, slowdown to asymptote, downturn). We do not find strong support for the downturn model in our analyses, which suggests that dinosaur speciation rates were not in terminal decline prior to the K-Pg boundary and that the clade was still capable of generating new taxa. Nevertheless, we advocate caution in interpreting the results of such models, as they may not accurately reflect the complexities of the underlying data. Indeed, current phylogenetic methods may not provide the best test for hypotheses of dinosaur extinction; the collection of more dinosaur occurrence data will be essential to test these ideas further.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundary

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“…Additionally, due to an insufficient amount of comparative data within high‐resolution time bins (Dean et al . 2020) and the inherent errors in radiometric dating (Gates et al . 2010), the creation of a more tightly constrained correlative window is presently impractical.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2016; Dean et al . 2020). Currently, the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, a fossil‐rich package of terrestrial sedimentary rocks associated with the retreat of the epicontinental Western Interior Seaway (WIS), provides the only well‐constrained evidence for community–environment relationships in the broader context of palaeogeography, floral zonation, palaeoclimate and sea‐level changes (Brusatte et al .…”

Section: Concept Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: the Maastrichtian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

et al. 2021

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Documenting the patterns and potential associated processes of ancient biotas has always been a central challenge in palaeontology. Over recent decades, intense debate has focused on the organization of dinosaur-dominated communities, yet no general consensus has been reached on how these communities were organized in a spatial context. Here, we used analytical routines typically applied in metacommunity ecology to provide novel insights into dinosaurian distributions across the latest Cretaceous of North America. To do this, we combined fossil occurrences with functional, phylogenetic and palaeoenvironmental modelling, and adopted the perspective that more reasonable conclusions on palaeoecological reconstructions can be gained from studies that consider the organization of biotas along ecological gradients at multiple spatial scales. Our results showed that dinosaurs were restricted in range to different parts of the Hell Creek Formation, prompting the recognition of discrete and compartmentalized faunal areas during the Maastrichtian at fine-grained scales, whereas taxa with the broadest ranges included those with narrower distributions when combining data from various geological formations across the Western Interior of North America. Although groups of dinosaurs had coincident range boundaries, their communities responded to multiple ecologically-important gradients when compensating for differences in sampling effort. Metacommunity structures of both ornithischians and theropods were correlated with climatic barriers and potential trophic relationships between herbivores and carnivores, thereby suggesting that dinosaurian faunas were shaped by physiological constraints, limited food resources abundance, and a combination of bottom-up and top-down forces across multiple spatial grains and extents.

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Estimating ancient biogeographic patterns with statistical model discrimination

Gates

Cai

et al. 2022

The Anatomical Record

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The geographic ranges in which species live is a function of many factors underlying ecological and evolutionary contingencies. Observing the geographic range of an individual species provides valuable information about these historical contingencies for a lineage, determining the distribution of many distantly related species in tandem provides information about large-scale constraints on evolutionary and ecological processes generally. We present a linear regression method that allows for the discrimination of various hypothetical biogeographical models for determining which landscape distributional pattern best matches data from the fossil record. The linear regression models used in the discrimination rely on geodesic distances between sampling sites (typically geologic formations) as the independent variable and three possible dependent variables: Dice/Sorensen similarity; Euclidean distance; and phylogenetic community dissimilarity. Both the similarity and distance measures are useful for full-community analyses without evolutionary information, whereas the phylogenetic community dissimilarity requires phylogenetic data. Importantly, the discrimination method uses linear regression residual error to provide relative measures of support for each biogeographical model tested, not absolute answers or p-values. When applied to a recently published dataset of Campanian pollen, we find evidence that supports two plant communities separated by a transitional zone of unknown size. A similar case study of ceratopsid dinosaurs using phylogenetic community dissimilarity provided no evidence of a biogeographical pattern, but this case study suffers from a lack of data to accurately discriminate and/or too much temporal mixing. Future research aiming to reconstruct the distribution of organisms across a landscape has a statisticalbased method for determining what biogeographic distributional model best matches the available data.

show abstract

Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

Cited by 30 publications

References 101 publications

Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundary

Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundary

Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: the Maastrichtian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

Estimating ancient biogeographic patterns with statistical model discrimination

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