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Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis
Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to evolve active flight, lived between 210 and 66 million years ago. They were important components of Mesozoic ecosystems, and reconstructing pterosaur diets is vital for understanding their origins, their roles within Mesozoic food webs and the impact of other fly...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7595196/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33116130 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19022-2 |
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author | Bestwick, Jordan Unwin, David M. Butler, Richard J. Purnell, Mark A. |
author_facet | Bestwick, Jordan Unwin, David M. Butler, Richard J. Purnell, Mark A. |
author_sort | Bestwick, Jordan |
collection | PubMed |
description | Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to evolve active flight, lived between 210 and 66 million years ago. They were important components of Mesozoic ecosystems, and reconstructing pterosaur diets is vital for understanding their origins, their roles within Mesozoic food webs and the impact of other flying vertebrates (i.e. birds) on their evolution. However, pterosaur dietary hypotheses are poorly constrained as most rely on morphological-functional analogies. Here we constrain the diets of 17 pterosaur genera by applying dental microwear texture analysis to the three-dimensional sub-micrometre scale tooth textures that formed during food consumption. We reveal broad patterns of dietary diversity (e.g. Dimorphodon as a vertebrate consumer; Austriadactylus as a consumer of ‘hard’ invertebrates) and direct evidence of sympatric niche partitioning (Rhamphorhynchus as a piscivore; Pterodactylus as a generalist invertebrate consumer). We propose that the ancestral pterosaur diet was dominated by invertebrates and later pterosaurs evolved into piscivores and carnivores, shifts that might reflect ecological displacements due to pterosaur-bird competition. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7595196 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75951962020-11-10 Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis Bestwick, Jordan Unwin, David M. Butler, Richard J. Purnell, Mark A. Nat Commun Article Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to evolve active flight, lived between 210 and 66 million years ago. They were important components of Mesozoic ecosystems, and reconstructing pterosaur diets is vital for understanding their origins, their roles within Mesozoic food webs and the impact of other flying vertebrates (i.e. birds) on their evolution. However, pterosaur dietary hypotheses are poorly constrained as most rely on morphological-functional analogies. Here we constrain the diets of 17 pterosaur genera by applying dental microwear texture analysis to the three-dimensional sub-micrometre scale tooth textures that formed during food consumption. We reveal broad patterns of dietary diversity (e.g. Dimorphodon as a vertebrate consumer; Austriadactylus as a consumer of ‘hard’ invertebrates) and direct evidence of sympatric niche partitioning (Rhamphorhynchus as a piscivore; Pterodactylus as a generalist invertebrate consumer). We propose that the ancestral pterosaur diet was dominated by invertebrates and later pterosaurs evolved into piscivores and carnivores, shifts that might reflect ecological displacements due to pterosaur-bird competition. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-10-28 /pmc/articles/PMC7595196/ /pubmed/33116130 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19022-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Bestwick, Jordan Unwin, David M. Butler, Richard J. Purnell, Mark A. Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title | Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title_full | Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title_fullStr | Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title_full_unstemmed | Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title_short | Dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
title_sort | dietary diversity and evolution of the earliest flying vertebrates revealed by dental microwear texture analysis |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7595196/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33116130 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19022-2 |
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