Multifaceted disparity approach reveals dinosaur herbivory flourished before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction

Nordén, Klara K.; Stubbs, Thomas L.; Prieto-Márquez, Albert; Benton, Michael J.

doi:10.1017/pab.2018.26

Cited by 22 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 85 publications

(161 reference statements)

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“…5D). This apparent saturation pattern mirrors the "morphospace packing" trend reported by Nordén et al (2018), based on an FIGURE 6. Rates of body-size evolution in hadrosauroids estimated using the variable-rates model in BayesTraits.…”

Section: The Hadrosaurid Feeding Apparatussupporting

confidence: 78%

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Morphological innovation and the evolution of hadrosaurid dinosaurs

Stubbs¹,

Benton

Elsler³

et al. 2019

Paleobiology

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The hadrosaurids were a successful group of herbivorous dinosaurs. During the Late Cretaceous, 100 to 66 million years ago, hadrosaurids had high diversity, rapid speciation rates, and wide geographic distribution. Most hadrosaurids were large bodied and had similar postcranial skeletons. However, they show important innovations in the skull, including disparate crests that functioned as socio-sexual display structures, and a complex feeding apparatus, with specialized jaws bearing dental batteries. Little is known about the macroevolutionary processes that produced these evolutionary novelties. Here we provide novel perspectives using evolutionary rate and disparity analyses. Our results show that hadrosaurid cranial evolution was complex and dynamic, but their postcranial skeleton and body size were conservative. High cranial disparity was achieved through multiple bursts of phenotypic innovation. We highlight contrasting evolutionary trends within hadrosaurids between the disparate facial skeleton and crests, which both showed multiple high-rate shifts, and the feeding apparatus, which had low variance and high rates on a single phylogenetic branch leading to the diverse Saurolophidae. We reveal that rapid evolutionary rates were important for producing the high disparity of exaggerated crests and present novel evidence that the hadrosaurid diversification was linked to both a key adaptive innovation in the feeding apparatus and multiple bursts of innovation in socio-sexual displays.

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Section: The Hadrosaurid Feeding Apparatussupporting

confidence: 78%

“…S7). However, in both analyses, the distribution of taxa within morphospace was nearly identical for the major axes, as previously discussed by Hopkins (2016) and Nordén et al (2018). We used a phylomorphospace approach to visualize the phylogenetic branching pattern.…”

Section: Morphological Disparitymentioning

confidence: 86%

Morphological innovation and the evolution of hadrosaurid dinosaurs

Stubbs¹,

Benton

Elsler³

et al. 2019

Paleobiology

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“…As previously noted, these relatively low percentages of variation are the combined result of having many characters, missing data and using negative eigenvalue correction during PCOA (Hopkins ; Nordén et al . ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…However, the distribution of taxa in morphospace is almost identical in biplots generated from the major axes of variation (PCO1–PCO5), as previously noted by Hopkins () and Nordén et al . (). Therefore, although the percentage of variance reported is comparatively low, the biplots of PCO1–PCO2 morphospace still represent a decent proportion of overall variance and illustrate the major axes of variation.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Morphological disparity in theropod jaws: comparing discrete characters and geometric morphometrics

et al. 2019

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Disparity, the diversity of form and function of organisms, can be assessed from cladistic or phenetic characters, and from discrete characters or continuous characters such as landmarks, outlines, or ratios. But do these different methods of assessing disparity provide comparable results? Here we provide evidence that all metrics correlate significantly with each other and capture similar patterns of morphological variation. We compare three methods of capturing morphological disparity (discrete characters, geometric morphometric outlines and geometric morphometric landmarks) in coelurosaurian dinosaurs. We standardize our study by focusing all our metrics on the mandible, so avoiding the risk of confounding disparity methods with anatomical coverage of the taxa. The correlation is strongest between the two geometric morphometric methods, and weaker between the morphometric methods and the discrete characters. By using phylogenetic simulations of discrete character and geometric morphometric data sets, we show that the strength of these correlations is significantly greater than expected from the evolution of random data under Brownian motion. All disparity metrics confirm that Maniraptoriformes had the highest disparity of all coelurosaurians, and omnivores and herbivores had higher disparity than carnivores.

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“…Determining which aspects of morphological variation are extracted by specific PCoA axes is difficult, as the link with the original variables is lost once they are ordinated. Recent work evaluated the presence or absence of bias between morphological regions or "modules" as defined by characters of a cladistic dataset (Nordén et al 2018), but so far no study has examined whether properties of cladistic matrices extrinsic to the character codings themselves (such as body size) has an influence on the resulting ordination.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body size correlates with discrete-character morphological proxies

Brougham

Campione

2020

Paleobiology

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Principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) is a statistical ordination technique commonly applied to morphology-based cladistic matrices to study macroevolutionary patterns, morphospace occupation, and disparity. However, PCoA-based morphospaces are dissociated from the original data; therefore, whether such morphospaces accurately reflect body-plan disparity or extrinsic factors, such as body size, remains uncertain. We collated nine character–taxon matrices of dinosaurs together with body-mass estimates for all taxa and tested for relationships between body size and both the principal axis of variation (i.e., PCo1) and the entire set of PCo scores. The possible effects of body size on macroevolutionary hypotheses derived from ordinated matrices were tested by reevaluating evidence for the accelerated accumulation of avian-type traits indicated by a strong directional shift in PCo1 scores in hypothetical ancestors of modern birds. Body mass significantly accounted for, on average, approximately 50% and 16% of the phylogenetically corrected variance in PCo1 and all PCo scores, respectively. Along the avian stem lineage, approximately 30% of the morphological variation is attributed to the reconstructed body masses of each ancestor. When the effects of body size are adjusted, the period of accelerated trait accumulation is replaced by a more gradual, additive process. Our results indicate that even at low proportions of variance, body size can noticeably affect macroevolutionary hypotheses generated from ordinated morphospaces. Future studies should thoroughly explore the nature of their character data in association with PCoA-based morphospaces and use a residual/covariate approach to account for potential correlations with body size.

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Multifaceted disparity approach reveals dinosaur herbivory flourished before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction

Cited by 22 publications

References 85 publications

Morphological innovation and the evolution of hadrosaurid dinosaurs

Morphological innovation and the evolution of hadrosaurid dinosaurs

Morphological disparity in theropod jaws: comparing discrete characters and geometric morphometrics

Body size correlates with discrete-character morphological proxies

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