Major transitions in Cretaceous vertebrate palaeocommunities of western North America

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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.