Data from: Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: The Maastricthian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

Resumen

Documenting the patterns and potential associated processes of ancient biotas has always been a central challenge in palaeontology. Over the last decades, intense debate has focused on the organisation of dinosaur–dominated communities, yet no general consensus has been reached on how these communities were organised in a spatial context and if primarily affected by abiotic or biotic agents. Here, we used analytical routines typically applied in metacommunity ecology to provide novel insights into dinosaurian distributions across the latest Cretaceous of North America. To do this, we combined fossil occurrences with functional, phylogenetic and palaeoenvironmental modelling, and adopted the perspective that more reasonable conclusions on palaeoecological reconstructions can be gained from studies that consider the organisation of biotas along ecological gradients at multiple spatial scales. Our results showed that dinosaurs were restricted in range to different parts of the Hell Creek Formation, prompting the recognition of discrete and compartmentalised faunal areas during the Maastrichtian at fine-grained scales, whereas taxa ranges formed quasi–nested groups when combining data from various geological formations across the Western Interior of North America. Although groups of dinosaurs had coincident range boundaries, their communities responded to multiple ecologically–important gradients when compensating for differences in sampling effort. Metacommunity structures of both ornithischians and theropods were correlated with climatic barriers and potential trophic relationships between herbivores and carnivores, thereby suggesting that dinosaurian faunas were shaped by physiological constraints and a combination of bottom-up and top-down forces across multiple spatial grains and extents.