ArticlePloS one2012
Body size distribution of the dinosaurs.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 25 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global and regional climate change impacted Paleogene mammal faunas in Central Asia.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Persistent body size bias in the fossil record of Cenozoic North American mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Integrating climate change and fine-scale habitat suitability to assess amphibian range shift in Mount Emei, China.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Macroevolutionary trends in Ceratosauria body size: insights of phylogenetic comparative methods.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Use of videos to measure dynamic body acceleration as a proxy for metabolic costs in coral reef damselfish (Chromis viridis).The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Exceptionally preserved stomach contents of a young tyrannosaurid reveal an ontogenetic dietary shift in an iconic extinct predator.Science advances · 2023Article
- Body size and life history shape the historical biogeography of tetrapods.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Resource requirements for ecosystem conservation: A combined industrial and natural ecology approach to quantifying natural capital use in nature.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Diet of Mesozoic toothed birds (Longipterygidae) inferred from quantitative analysis of extant avian diet proxies.BMC biology · 2022Article
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- Phylogenetic signal in the vocalizations of vocal learning and vocal non-learning birds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The fast and the frugal: Divergent locomotory strategies drive limb lengthening in theropod dinosaurs.PloS one · 2020Article
- Competition structured a Late Cretaceous megaherbivorous dinosaur assemblage.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The evolution and role of the hyposphene-hypantrum articulation in Archosauria: phylogeny, size and/or mechanics?Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Metabolic physiology explains macroevolutionary trends in the melanic colour system across amniotes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
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- The evolution of body size and shape in the human career.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Gigantism and Its Implications for the History of Life.PloS one · 2016Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The distribution of species body size is critically important for determining resource use within a group or clade. It is widely known that non-avian dinosaurs were the largest creatures to roam the Earth. There is, however, little understanding of how maximum species body size was distributed among the dinosaurs. Do they share a similar distribution to modern day vertebrate groups in spite of their large size, or did they exhibit fundamentally different distributions due to unique evolutionary pressures and adaptations? Here, we address this question by comparing the distribution of maximum species body size for dinosaurs to an extensive set of extant and extinct vertebrate groups. We also examine the body size distribution of dinosaurs by various sub-groups, time periods and formations. We find that dinosaurs exhibit a strong skew towards larger species, in direct contrast to modern day vertebrates. This pattern is not solely an artefact of bias in the fossil record, as demonstrated by contrasting distributions in two major extinct groups and supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs exhibited a fundamentally different life history strategy to other terrestrial vertebrates. A disparity in the size distribution of the herbivorous Ornithischia and Sauropodomorpha and the largely carnivorous Theropoda suggests that this pattern may have been a product of a divergence in evolutionary strategies: herbivorous dinosaurs rapidly evolved large size to escape predation by carnivores and maximise digestive efficiency; carnivores had sufficient resources among juvenile dinosaurs and non-dinosaurian prey to achieve optimal success at smaller body size.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.