Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous
García-Girón, Jorge; Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro; Alahuhta, Janne; DeMarJr., David G.; Heino, Jani; Mannion, Philip D.; Williamson, Thomas E.; Mantilla, Gregory P. Wilson; Brusatte, Stephen L. (2022-12-07)
García-Girón, J., Chiarenza, A. A., Alahuhta, J., DeMar, D. G., Heino, J., Mannion, P. D., Williamson, T. E., Wilson Mantilla, G. P., & Brusatte, S. L. (2022). Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous. Science Advances, 8(49), eadd5040. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add5040
© 2022 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe202301031286
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
It has long been debated why groups such as non-avian dinosaurs became extinct whereas mammals and other lineages survived the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction 66 million years ago. We used Markov networks, ecological niche partitioning, and Earth System models to reconstruct North American food webs and simulate ecospace occupancy before and after the extinction event. We find a shift in latest Cretaceous dinosaur faunas, as medium-sized species counterbalanced a loss of megaherbivores, but dinosaur niches were otherwise stable and static, potentially contributing to their demise. Smaller vertebrates, including mammals, followed a consistent trajectory of increasing trophic impact and relaxation of niche limits beginning in the latest Cretaceous and continuing after the mass extinction. Mammals did not simply proliferate after the extinction event; rather, their earlier ecological diversification might have helped them survive.
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