Climate-mediated diversification of turtles in the Cretaceous

David B. Nicholson (), Patricia A. Holroyd, Roger B. J. Benson and Paul M. Barrett
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David B. Nicholson: The Natural History Museum
Patricia A. Holroyd: Museum of Paleontology, University of California, 1101 Valley Life Sciences Building, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Roger B. J. Benson: University of Oxford
Paul M. Barrett: The Natural History Museum

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Chelonians are ectothermic, with an extensive fossil record preserved in diverse palaeoenvironmental settings: consequently, they represent excellent models for investigating organismal response to long-term environmental change. We present the first Mesozoic chelonian taxic richness curve, subsampled to remove geological/collection biases, and demonstrate that their palaeolatitudinal distributions were climate mediated. At the Jurassic/Cretaceous transition, marine taxa exhibit minimal diversity change, whereas non-marine diversity increases. A Late Cretaceous peak in ‘global’ non-marine subsampled richness coincides with high palaeolatitude occurrences and the Cretaceous thermal maximum (CTM): however, this peak also records increased geographic sampling and is not recovered in continental-scale diversity patterns. Nevertheless, a model-detrended richness series (insensitive to geographic sampling) also recovers a Late Cretaceous peak, suggesting genuine geographic range expansion among non-marine turtles during the CTM. Increased Late Cretaceous diversity derives from intensive North American sampling, but subsampling indicates that Early Cretaceous European/Asian diversity may have exceeded that of Late Cretaceous North America.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8848

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