Speaker
Description
Mammals underwent a taxonomic and morphological adaptive radiation across the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary. Morphological adaptations to the jaw, relating to disparate feeding ecologies, have been shown to increase in disparity during the Cenozoic. Mammal body mass also increases across the K/Pg boundary and is intrinsically linked to many aspects of a mammal’s ecological niche, including their feeding ecology and therefore jaw morphology. Here we test whether increases in jaw phenotypic disparity among early Cenozoic mammals is linked to their evolutionary expansion into larger body sizes that may have permitted the exploration of new feeding roles. Using jaw continuous character traits for Jurassic-Eocene and for Recent (including Pleistocene megafauna) mammals, we analysed jaw ecomorphological disparity across small and large bodied mammals using a principal component analysis. Additionally, using a recently published metatree of synapsids pruned to include the mammaliaform and mammal species from this study, we analysed rates of jaw morphological diversification and compared these rates to body mass evolution. We found that large mammals have higher jaw ecomorphological disparity than small mammal throughout the early Cenozoic and in the Recent. Moreover, extant and Pleistocene large mammals show higher disparity than Eocene large mammals, and there are some jaw morphologies that are unique to large mammals relative to small mammals.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| Poster Presentation Option | Yes, I’m willing to present as a poster. |
