Major transitions in Cretaceous vertebrate palaeocommunities of western North America

北美西部白垩纪脊椎动物古群落的重大转变

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-04012
• 负责人: Arbour, Victoria
• 金额: $ 2.32万
• 依托单位: University of Victoria
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=739620
• 关键词: Major; transitions; Cretaceous; vertebrate; palaeocommunities

Fossils provide the only long-term record of ecological and evolutionary change, providing a deep-time perspective to current biodiversity change. The Cretaceous Period (145 to 66 million years ago) was a time of high global temperatures and dramatic fluctuations in sea level ending with an asteroid impact-induced sudden mass extinction event, and as such serves as an important source of information regarding biotic responses to both gradual and cataclysmic environmental changes. This research program will investigate responses of vertebrate palaeocommunities to both biotic and abiotic global change during the Cretaceous, with a focus on dinosaurs, a large and diverse group of vertebrates that occupied many of the ecological niches currently occupied by mammals. Over the next 5 years, this program aims to clarify the diversity and systematics of several dinosaur clades the span the Cretaceous of North America, therefore providing foundational information on biodiversity change throughout this period, and use this information to examine the effects of climatic and sea-level changes on broader patterns of dinosaur evolution such as their palaeobiogeography. This work will include field-based palaeontological research focusing on the understudied Cretaceous outcrops of northern British Columbia, a key geographic region for interpreting dinosaur geodispersal between North America and Asia. It will also incorporate quantitative approaches for investigating alpha-level taxonomy of dinosaurs using specimens in museum collections, revised phylogenetic analyses of dinosaur clades using both parsimony and Bayesian approaches, and palaeobiogeographic analyses of dinosaur distributions blending data from the complementary but distinct datasets represented by the dinosaur skeletal and footprint fossil records.

化石提供了生态和进化变化的唯一长期记录，为当前生物多样性的变化提供了一个深入的视角。白垩纪（1.45亿至6600万年前）是一个全球气温高、海平面剧烈波动的时期，以小行星撞击引起的突然大规模灭绝事件告终，因此，它是关于生物对渐进和灾难性环境变化的反应的重要信息来源。该研究项目将调查白垩纪脊椎动物古群落对生物和非生物全球变化的反应，重点关注恐龙，这是一种庞大而多样的脊椎动物群体，占据了许多目前由哺乳动物占据的生态位。在接下来的5年里，该项目旨在阐明北美白垩纪几个恐龙分支的多样性和系统分类，从而提供这一时期生物多样性变化的基础信息，并利用这些信息来研究气候和海平面变化对恐龙进化的更广泛模式的影响，如它们的古生物地理。这项工作将包括以实地古生物学研究为基础，重点研究不列颠哥伦比亚省北部的白垩纪露头，这是解释北美和亚洲之间恐龙地理分布的关键地理区域。它还将采用定量方法，利用博物馆收藏的标本来调查恐龙的阿尔法级分类，使用简约和贝叶斯方法对恐龙枝进行修订的系统发育分析，以及对恐龙分布进行古生物地理学分析，混合来自互补但不同的数据集的数据，以恐龙骨骼和足迹化石记录为代表。