Dinosaur Biodiversity Declined before Chicxulub Asteroid Impact: Study

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Condamine et al. analyze the speciation-extinction dynamics for six key dinosaur families, and find a decline across dinosaurs, where diversification shifted to a declining-diversity pattern 76 million years ago. Image credit: Jorge Gonzalez.

The most famous mass extinction was the disappearance of non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, after ruling the Earth for 170 million years. The best-supported extinction model is the impact of a large asteroid at Chicxulub, Mexico. However, it is widely debated whether dinosaurs were in decline or not before the Chicxulub impact. A study in the journal Nature Communications provides new evidence for an environmentally-driven global decline across dinosaur groups well before the asteroid impact.

“We looked at the six most abundant dinosaur families (Ankylosauridae, Ceratopsidae, Hadrosauridae, Dromaeosauridae, Troodontidae, and Tyrannosauridae) through the whole of the Cretaceous, spanning from 150 to 66 million years ago, and found that they were all evolving and expanding and clearly being successful,” said Dr. Fabien Condamine, a researcher at the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier and CNRS.

“Then, 76 million years ago, they show a sudden downturn. Their rates of extinction rose and in some cases the rate of origin of new species dropped off.”

Dr. Condamine and colleagues used Bayesian modeling techniques to account for several kinds of uncertainties such as incomplete fossil records, uncertainties over age-dating the fossils, and uncertainties about the evolutionary models.

The models were each run millions of times to consider all these possible sources of error and to find whether the analyses would converge on an agreed most probable result.

“In all cases, we found evidence for the decline prior to the bolide impact,” said Dr. Guillaume Guinot, a researcher at the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier and CNRS.

“We also looked at how these dinosaur ecosystems functioned, and it became clear that the plant-eating species tended to disappear first, and this made the latest dinosaur ecosystems unstable and liable to collapse if environmental conditions became damaging.”

“We used over 1,600 carefully checked records of dinosaurs through the Cretaceous,” added Professor Phil Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Edmonton.

“I have been collecting dinosaurs in North America, Mongolia, China, and other areas for some time, and I have seen huge improvements in our knowledge of the ages of the dinosaur-bearing rock formations.”

“This means that the data are getting better all the time. The decline in dinosaurs in their last ten million years makes sense, and indeed this is the best-sampled part of their fossil record as our study shows.”

“In the analyses, we explored different kinds of possible causes of the dinosaur decline,” said Professor Mike Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol.

“It became clear that there were two main factors, first that overall climates were becoming cooler, and this made life harder for the dinosaurs which likely relied on warm temperatures.”

“Then, the loss of herbivores made the ecosystems unstable and prone to extinction cascade.”

“We also found that the longer-lived dinosaur species were more liable to extinction, perhaps reflecting that they could not adapt to the new conditions on Earth.”

“This was a key moment in the evolution of life,” Dr. Condamine said.

“The world had been dominated by dinosaurs for over 160 million years, and as they declined other groups began their rise to dominance, including the mammals.”

“The dinosaurs were mostly so huge they probably hardly knew that the furry little mammals were there in the undergrowth.”

“But the mammals began to increase in numbers of species before the dinosaurs had gone, and then after the impact they had their chance to build new kinds of ecosystems which we see today.”

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F.L. Condamine et al. 2021. Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures. Nat Commun 12, 3833; doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-23754-0

Source: www.sci-news.com/