Major transitions in Cretaceous vertebrate palaeocommunities of western North America

化石提供了生态和进化变化的唯一长期记录，为当前的生物多样性变化提供了一个深入的视角。白垩纪时期(1.45亿至6600万年前)是全球气温升高和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。这项研究计划将调查白垩纪期间脊椎动物古群落对生物和非生物全球变化的反应，重点是恐龙，这是一大群多样化的脊椎动物，占据了目前哺乳动物占据的许多生态位。在接下来的5年里，该计划旨在阐明横跨北美白垩纪的几个恐龙支系的多样性和系统学，从而提供整个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，例如它们的古生物地理。这项工作将包括基于野外的古生物研究，重点是不列颠哥伦比亚省北部白垩纪的未被研究的露头，该地区是解释恐龙在北美和亚洲之间地理扩散的关键地理区域。它还将纳入利用博物馆收藏的标本调查恐龙阿尔法级别分类的量化方法，使用简约法和贝叶斯方法对恐龙支系进行修订的系统发育分析，以及结合恐龙骨骼和足迹化石记录所代表的互补但不同的数据集的数据对恐龙分布进行古生物地理分析。

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.