10.5061/DRYAD.MPG4F4R0Z
Brown, Caleb
0000-0001-6463-8677
Royal Tyrrell Museum
Campione, Nicolas
University of New England
Wilson Mantilla, Gregory
0000-0003-3604-5473
University of Washington
Evans, David
Royal Ontario Museum
Size-driven preservational and macroecological biases in the latest
Maastrichtian terrestrial vertebrate assemblages of North America
Dryad
dataset
2021
FOS: Biological sciences
Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary
body mass
preservation
Hell Creek Formation
Lance Formation
Maastrichtian
completeness
2021-10-21T00:00:00Z
2021-10-21T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5248790
249238 bytes
4
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
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 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 non significant
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
amidst 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.
Supplemental Table 1 – Data on number of dinosaur collections and
occurrences for Maastrichtian-aged geological formations globally. Data
downloaded from the Paleobiology Database on 2020-08-27. Data URL:
http://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/strata.csv?datainfo&rowcount&base_name=Dinosauria&max_ma=72.1&min_ma=66 Supplemental Table 2 - Dinosaur faunal list for the Hell Creek Formation (and Lance) as well as accompanying data. Each species includes data on: date of description, reference specimens, skeletal completeness, taphonomic mode, body mass estimate, body mass estimate method. Sheet 1: Hell Creek - Taxonomic Split, Sheet 2: Hell Creek - Taxonomic Lump, Sheet 3: Hell Creek and Lance - Taxonomic Split, Sheet 4: Hell Creek and Lance - Taxonomic Lump. Sheet 5: Taxonomic Split/Lump references. See Methods section of paper for details. Supplemental Table 3 - Summary data from the six major surveys of dinosaur richness and relative abundances within the Hell Creek Formation, or Hell Creek Formation and coeval deposits. See Methods section of paper for details. Supplemental Table 4 - Data for specimen-level intraspecific dinosaur abundances as a factor of body mass/size for Edmontosaurus (sheet 1), Tyrannosaurus (sheet 2), and Triceratops (sheet 3). Data include specimen number and size metric. See Methods section of paper for details. Supplemental Table 5 - Mammal faunal list for the Hell Creek Formation as well as accompanying data. Each species includes data on: body mass estimate, mass estimate method, reference specimen, taphonomic mode, and skeletal completeness. See Methods section of paper for details. Supplemental Table 6 - Correlations (Spearman rank correlation) of body mass with relative abundance of dinosaur families based on published survey data.