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Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundary
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2020-11-18
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2021-03-03
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Dinosauria
Bayesian
GLMMs
K-Pg boundary
diversification rates
phylogeny
Bayesian
GLMMs
K-Pg boundary
diversification rates
phylogeny
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Abstract
Determining the tempo and mode of non-avian dinosaur extinction is one of the most contentious issues in palaeobiology. Extensive disagreements remain over whether their extinction was catastrophic and geologically instantaneous or the culmination of long-term evolutionary trends. These conflicts have arisen due to numerous hierarchical sampling biases in the fossil record and differences in analytical methodology, with some studies identifying long-term declines in dinosaur richness prior to the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary and others proposing continued diversification. Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models to assess the fit of 12 dinosaur phylogenies to three speciation models (null, slowdown to asymptote, downturn). We do not find strong support for the downturn model in our analyses, which suggests that dinosaur speciation rates were not in terminal decline prior to the K-Pg boundary and that the clade was still capable of generating new taxa. Nevertheless, we advocate caution in interpreting the results of such models, as they may not accurately reflect the complexities of the underlying data. Indeed, current phylogenetic methods may not provide the best test for hypotheses of dinosaur extinction; the collection of more dinosaur occurrence data will be essential to test these ideas further.
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Bonsor Joseph A., Barrett Paul M., Raven Thomas J. and Cooper Natalie 2020Dinosaur diversification rates were not in decline prior to the K-Pg boundaryR. Soc. open sci.7201195201195 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201195
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© 2020 The Authors.
Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
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2054-5703
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2054-5703