The oldest North American pachycephalosaurid and the hidden diversity of small-bodied ornithischian dinosaurs

David C. Evans (), Ryan K. Schott, Derek W. Larson, Caleb M. Brown and Michael J. Ryan
Additional contact information
David C. Evans: Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queens Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2C6
Ryan K. Schott: University of Toronto
Derek W. Larson: University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology, University of Alberta
Caleb M. Brown: University of Toronto
Michael J. Ryan: Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 1 Wade Oval Drive, University Circle, Cleveland, Ohio 44106, USA

Nature Communications, 2013, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Taphonomic biases dictate how organisms are represented in the fossil record, but their effect on studies of vertebrate diversity dynamics is poorly studied. In contrast to the high diversity and abundance of small-bodied animals in extant ecosystems, small-bodied dinosaurs are less common than their large-bodied counterparts, but it is unclear whether this reflects unique properties of dinosaurian ecosystems or relates to taphonomic biases. A new, fully domed pachycephalosaurid dinosaur, Acrotholus audeti, from the Santonian of Alberta predates incompletely domed taxa, and provides important new information on pachycephalosaur evolution and the completeness of the ornithischian fossil record. Here we provide the first empirical evidence that the diversity of small-bodied ornithischian dinosaurs is strongly underestimated based on ghost lineages and the high proportion of robust and diagnostic frontoparietal domes compared with other pachycephalosaur fossils. This suggests preservational biases have a confounding role in attempts to decipher vertebrate palaeoecology and diversity dynamics through the Mesozoic.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2749 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:4:y:2013:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms2749

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2749

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().