ArticleNature communications2021
Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Transition Processes in Technological Systems: Inspiration from Processes in Biological Evolution.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Species diversity within morpho-functional groups drives diversity dependence in reef ecosystems.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- The spatiotemporal distribution of Mesozoic dinosaur diversity.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Article
- Late Cretaceous ammonoids show that drivers of diversification are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Mechanistic phylodynamic models do not provide conclusive evidence that non-avian dinosaurs were in decline before their final extinction.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Article
- Drivers of the artiodactyl turnover in insular western Europe at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Relict duck-billed dinosaurs survived into the last age of the dinosaurs in subantarctic Chile.Science advances · 2023Article
- Combining palaeontological and neontological data shows a delayed diversification burst of carcharhiniform sharks likely mediated by environmental change.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous.Science advances · 2022Article
- Low dinosaur biodiversity in central China 2 million years prior to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Calibrating the zenith of dinosaur diversity in the Campanian of the Western Interior Basin by CA-ID-TIMS U-Pb geochronology.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Short-term paleogeographic reorganizations and climate events shaped diversification of North American freshwater gastropods over deep time.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Global ecomorphological restructuring of dominant marine reptiles prior to the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Global diversity dynamics in the fossil record are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Onset of Late Cretaceous diversification in Europe's freshwater gastropod fauna links to global climatic and biotic events.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The multicausal twilight of South American native mammalian predators (Metatheria, Sparassodonta).Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Multiple evolutionary origins and losses of tooth complexity in squamates.Nature communications · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The question why non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago (Ma) remains unresolved because of the coarseness of the fossil record. A sudden extinction caused by an asteroid is the most accepted hypothesis but it is debated whether dinosaurs were in decline or not before the impact. We analyse the speciation-extinction dynamics for six key dinosaur families, and find a decline across dinosaurs, where diversification shifted to a declining-diversity pattern ~76 Ma. We investigate the influence of ecological and physical factors, and find that the decline of dinosaurs was likely driven by global climate cooling and herbivorous diversity drop. The latter is likely due to hadrosaurs outcompeting other herbivores. We also estimate that extinction risk is related to species age during the decline, suggesting a lack of evolutionary novelty or adaptation to changing environments. These results support an environmentally driven decline of non-avian dinosaurs well before the asteroid impact.
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