ArticleiScience2021
Macroevolutionary dynamics of dentition in Mesozoic birds reveal no long-term selection towards tooth loss.
Article in iScience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loss, persistence and reversal of phenotypic traits.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Mandibular morphology clarifies phylogenetic relationships near the origin of crown birds.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
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- Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents.Biology letters · 2025Review
- Article
- Article
- Tip dating and Bayes factors provide insight into the divergences of crown bird clades across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The coevolution of rostral keratin and tooth distribution in dinosaurs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Fossil basicranium clarifies the origin of the avian central nervous system and inner ear.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Forty new specimens ofPeerJ · 2022Article
- Re-evaluating the morphological evidence for the re-evolution of lost mandibular teeth in frogs.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2021Article
- Article
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Several potential drivers of avian tooth loss have been proposed, although consensus remains elusive as fully toothless jaws arose independently numerous times among Mesozoic avialans and dinosaurs more broadly. The origin of crown bird edentulism has been discussed in terms of a broad-scale selective pressure or trend toward toothlessness, although this has never been quantitatively tested. Here, we find no evidence for models whereby iterative acquisitions of toothlessness among Mesozoic Avialae were driven by an overarching selective trend. Instead, our results support modularity among jaw regions underlying heterogeneous tooth loss patterns and indicate a substantially later transition to complete crown bird edentulism than previously hypothesized (∼90 mya). We show that patterns of avialan tooth loss adhere to Dollo's law and suggest that the exclusive survival of toothless birds to the present represents lineage-specific selective pressures, irreversibility of tooth loss, and the filter of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction.
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