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      Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the end-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America

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      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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          Abstract

          The sudden environmental catastrophe in the wake of the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact had drastic effects that rippled through animal communities. To explore how these effects may have been exacerbated by prior ecological changes, we used a food-web model to simulate the effects of primary productivity disruptions, such as those predicted to result from an asteroid impact, on ten Campanian and seven Maastrichtian terrestrial localities in North America. Our analysis documents that a shift in trophic structure between Campanian and Maastrichtian communities in North America led Maastrichtian communities to experience more secondary extinction at lower levels of primary production shutdown and possess a lower collapse threshold than Campanian communities. Of particular note is the fact that changes in dinosaur richness had a negative impact on the robustness of Maastrichtian ecosystems against environmental perturbations. Therefore, earlier ecological restructuring may have exacerbated the impact and severity of the end-Cretaceous extinction, at least in North America.

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          Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance

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            The Chicxulub asteroid impact and mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

            The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary approximately 65.5 million years ago marks one of the three largest mass extinctions in the past 500 million years. The extinction event coincided with a large asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, and occurred within the time of Deccan flood basalt volcanism in India. Here, we synthesize records of the global stratigraphy across this boundary to assess the proposed causes of the mass extinction. Notably, a single ejecta-rich deposit compositionally linked to the Chicxulub impact is globally distributed at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. The temporal match between the ejecta layer and the onset of the extinctions and the agreement of ecological patterns in the fossil record with modeled environmental perturbations (for example, darkness and cooling) lead us to conclude that the Chicxulub impact triggered the mass extinction.
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              Background and mass extinctions: the alternation of macroevolutionary regimes.

              Comparison of evolutionary patterns among Late Cretaceous marine bivalves and gastropods during times of normal, background levels of extinction and during the end-Cretaceous mass extinction indicates that mass extinctions are neither an intensification of background patterns nor an entirely random culling of the biota. During background times, traits such as planktotrophic larval development, broad geographic range of constituent species, and high species richness enhanced survivorship of species and genera. In contrast, during the, end-Cretaceous and other mass extinctions these factors were ineffectual, but broad geographic deployment of an entire lineage, regardless of the ranges of its constituent species, enhanced survivorship. Large-scale evolutionary patterns are evidently shaped by the alternation of these two macroevolutionary regimes, with rare but important mass extinctions driving shifts in the composition of the biota that have little relation to success during the background regime. Lineages or adaptations can be lost during mass extinctions for reasons unrelated to their survival values for organisms or species during background times, and long-term success would require the chance occurrence within a single lineage of sets of traits conducive to survivorship under both regimes.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                November 13 2012
                November 13 2012
                October 29 2012
                November 13 2012
                : 109
                : 46
                : 18857-18861
                Article
                10.1073/pnas.1202196109
                23112149
                4a4d7f09-cec5-47d4-8759-394513e85320
                © 2012
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