ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Highly resolved early Eocene food webs show development of modern trophic structure after the end-Cretaceous extinction.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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24 citing papers in PubMed.
- A paleoecological trophic network model of the Early Ordovician Lower Fezouata Shale (Morocco) fossil fauna.iScience · 2026Article
- Habitat-specific temporal variation in the pace of fish diversification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Algorithmic reconstruction of trophic networks from open-access species lists reveals key organisms in real ecosystems.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Article
- Tetrapod species-area relationships across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The modern pattern of insect herbivory predates the advent of angiosperms by 60 My.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring weighted network backbone extraction: A comparative analysis of structural techniques.PloS one · 2025Article
- The Micropaleoecology Framework: Evaluating Biotic Responses to Global Change Through Paleoproxy, Microfossil, and Ecological Data Integration.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- A highly resolved network reveals the role of terrestrial herbivory in structuring aboveground food webs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Bat consumption by holostean fishes in the Eocene Lake Messel: insights into the trophic adaptability of extinct gars and bowfins.Biology letters · 2024Article
- On the complexity of quantum link prediction in complex networks.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Ecosystem function after the K/Pg extinction: decoupling of marine carbon pump and diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Constraints and variation in food web link-species space.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Ecological dynamics of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems across three mid-Phanerozoic mass extinctions from northwest China.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The concerted emergence of well-known spatial and temporal ecological patterns in an evolutionary food web model in space.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Simulated evolution assembles more realistic food webs with more functionally similar species than invasion.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Climate shapes mammal community trophic structures and humans simplify them.Nature communications · 2019Article
- High richness of insect herbivory from the early Miocene Hindon Maar crater, Otago, New Zealand.PeerJ · 2017Article
- The uncertain role of diversity dependence in species diversification and the need to incorporate time-varying carrying capacities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Generalities of food web structure have been identified for extant ecosystems. However, the trophic organization of ancient ecosystems is unresolved, as prior studies of fossil webs have been limited by low-resolution, high-uncertainty data. We compiled highly resolved, well-documented feeding interaction data for 700 taxa from the 48 million-year-old latest early Eocene Messel Shale, which contains a species assemblage that developed after an interval of protracted environmental and biotal change during and following the end-Cretaceous extinction. We compared the network structure of Messel lake and forest food webs to extant webs using analyses that account for scale dependence of structure with diversity and complexity. The Messel lake web, with 94 taxa, displays unambiguous similarities in structure to extant webs. While the Messel forest web, with 630 taxa, displays differences compared to extant webs, they appear to result from high diversity and resolution of insect-plant interactions, rather than substantive differences in structure. The evidence presented here suggests that modern trophic organization developed along with the modern Messel biota during an 18 Myr interval of dramatic post-extinction change. Our study also has methodological implications, as the Messel forest web analysis highlights limitations of current food web data and models.
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