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Size-driven preservational and macroecological biases in the latest Maastrichtian terrestrial vertebrate assemblages of North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Caleb M. Brown Open the ORCID record for Caleb M. Brown [Opens in a new window] ,
Nicolás E. Campione ,
Gregory P. Wilson Mantilla  and
David C. Evans
Caleb M. Brown*
Affiliation:
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, P.O. Box 7500, Drumheller, Alberta T0J 0Y0, Canada. E-mail: caleb.brown@gov.ab.ca
Nicolás E. Campione
Affiliation:
Palaeoscience Research Centre, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia. E-mail: ncampion@une.edu.au.
Gregory P. Wilson Mantilla
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, University of Washington, Life Sciences Building, Seattle, Washington 98195-1800, U.S.A., and Burke Museum, University of Washington, 4300 15th Avenue NE, Seattle, Washington 98195, U.S.A. E-mail: gpwilson@uw.edu.
David C. Evans
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3B2, Canada, and Department of Natural History–Palaeobiology, Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C6, Canada. E-mail: davide@rom.on.ca
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

The end-Cretaceous (K/Pg) mass extinction event is the most recent and well-understood of the “big five” and triggered establishment of modern terrestrial ecosystem structure. Despite the depth of research into this event, our knowledge of upper Maastrichtian terrestrial deposits globally relies primarily on assemblage-level data limited to a few well-sampled formations in North America, the Hell Creek and Lance Formations. These assemblages disproportionally affect our interpretations of this important interval. Multiple investigations have quantified diversity patterns within these assemblages, but the potential effect of formation-level size-dependent taphonomic biases and their implications on extinction dynamics remains unexplored. Here, the relationship between taphonomy and body size of the Hell Creek Formation and Lance Formation dinosaurs and mammals are quantitatively analyzed. Small-bodied dinosaur taxa (<70 kg) are consistently less complete, unlikely to be articulated, and delayed in their description relative to their large-bodied counterparts. Family-level abundance (particularly skeletons) is strongly tied to body mass, and the relative abundance of juveniles of large-bodied taxa similarly is underrepresented. Mammals show similar but nonsignificant trends. The results are remarkably similar to those from the Campanian-aged Dinosaur Park Formation, suggesting a widespread strong taphonomic bias against the preservation of small taxa, which will result in their seemingly depauperate diversity within the assemblage. This taphonomically skewed view of diversity and abundance of small-bodied taxa amid our best late Maastrichtian samples has significant implications for understanding speciation and extinction dynamics (e.g., size-dependent extinction selectivity) across the K/Pg boundary.

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Paleobiology , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 210 - 238
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Copyright © Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Paleontological Society

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Supplementary material: Link

Brown et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4r0z
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