Swedish and Polish paleontologists are using hundreds of fossilized fecal and vomit samples from the Polish Basin in central Europe to reconstruct the rise of dinosaurs to play a dominant role in Earth’s ancient ecosystems. I investigated.
Bone-crushing archosaur fecal fossil smoke, smoke In the background is reconstruction. Image credit: Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki.
The fossil record shows that dinosaurs evolved during the mid-Triassic period (247 to 237 million years ago).
However, the dominance of dinosaurs in terrestrial ecosystems was not seen until the early Jurassic period, about 30 million years later.
Although many non-dinosaur tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) were expelled during this period, questions remain as to why dinosaurs came to dominate the ecosystem.
“The real detective work is piecing together ‘who ate who’ in the past,” said Martin Kvarnström, a paleontologist at Uppsala University.
“Being able to examine what animals ate and how they interacted with their environment helps us understand what enabled dinosaurs to be so successful.”
Dr. Kvarnström and his colleagues reconstructed the food web using more than 500 fossilized remains of digestive material (such as feces and vomit), known as bromalite, collected from the Polish Basin, which spans the Late Triassic to Early Jurassic period. We investigated this transition by constructing a.
“The research material was collected over a period of 25 years,” said Dr. Grzegorz Niedrzywicki, a paleontologist at Uppsala University and the Polish Geological Institute.
“It took years to piece everything together and paint a coherent picture.”
“Our study is innovative because we chose to understand the ecology of early dinosaurs based on their dietary preferences.”
“There were a lot of surprising discoveries along the way.”
Analysis of these remains (including 3D imaging of internal structures to reveal undigested food content) is compared to the existing fossil record, along with climate and botanical data, to determine the size and presence of vertebrates during this period. We estimated the change in quantity.
These data indicate that non-dinosaur tetrapods replaced omnivorous ancestors of early dinosaurs that evolved into the first carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs towards the end of the Triassic.
Researchers now believe that environmental changes associated with increased volcanic activity may have led to a greater variety of plant prey, which in turn led to the emergence of larger and more diverse herbivore species. Suggests.
This led to the evolution of even larger carnivorous dinosaurs by the beginning of the Jurassic period, completing the transition to dinosaur dominance within the ecosystem.
This analysis sheds light on the emergence of dinosaur dominance within the Polish Basin ecosystem.
“Our findings support the idea that stochastic processes and competitive advantage enabled dinosaurs’ great evolutionary success,” the authors said.
“Dinosaurs gradually achieved supremacy over 30 million years of evolution.”
“The processes illustrated by the Polish data may explain global patterns and shed new light on the emergence of environmentally dominated dinosaur dominance and gigantism that persisted until the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.” We suggest that there is a
team’s paper Published in a magazine nature.
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M. Kvarnström others. Digestive content and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy. naturepublished online on November 27, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08265-4
Source: www.sci.news
