Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures - CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Nature Communications Année : 2021

Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures

Résumé

The question why non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago (Ma) remains unresolved because of the coarseness of the fossil record. A sudden extinction caused by an asteroid is the most accepted hypothesis but it is debated whether dinosaurs were in decline or not before the impact. We analyse the speciation-extinction dynamics for six key dinosaur families, and find a decline across dinosaurs, where diversification shifted to a declining-diversity pattern ~76 Ma. We investigate the influence of ecological and physical factors, and find that the decline of dinosaurs was likely driven by global climate cooling and herbivorous diversity drop. The latter is likely due to hadrosaurs outcompeting other herbivores. We also estimate that extinction risk is related to species age during the decline, suggesting a lack of evolutionary novelty or adaptation to changing environments. These results support an environmentally driven decline of non-avian dinosaurs well before the asteroid impact.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Condamine et al. 2021 - Nat. Comm.pdf (3.02 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-03367583 , version 1 (06-10-2021)

Licence

Paternité

Identifiants

Citer

Fabien L. Condamine, Guillaume Guinot, Michael Benton, Philip Currie. Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures. Nature Communications, 2021, 12, pp.3833. ⟨10.1038/s41467-021-23754-0⟩. ⟨hal-03367583⟩
48 Consultations
77 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More