文章基本信息

标题：Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the end-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America
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作者：Jonathan S. Mitchell ; Peter D. Roopnarine ; Kenneth D. Angielczyk 等
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2012
卷号：109
期号：46
页码：18857-18861
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1202196109
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：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.
关键词：dinosaur diversity ; extinction selectivity ; paleoecology ; trophic cascade ; cascading extinctions on graphs