Contrasting terrestrial and marineecospace dynamics after the end-Triassic mass extinction event

Abstract

Mass extinctions have fundamentally altered the structure of the biospherethroughout Earth’s history. The ecological severity of mass extinctions iswell studied in marine ecosystems by categorizing marine taxa into func-tional groups based on‘ecospace’approaches, but the ecological responseof terrestrial ecosystems to mass extinctions is less well understood due tothe lack of a comparable methodology. Here, we present a new terrestrialecospace framework that categorizes fauna into functional groups as definedby tiering, motility and feeding traits. We applied the new terrestrial and tra-ditional marine ecospace analyses to data from the Paleobiology Databaseacross the end-Triassic mass extinction—a time of catastrophic global warming—to compare changes between the marine and terrestrial biospheres.We found that terrestrial functional groups experienced higher extinctionseverity, that taxonomic and functional richness are more tightly coupledin the terrestrial, and that the terrestrial realm continued to experiencehigh ecological dissimilarity in the wake of the extinction. Althoughsignals of extinction severity and ecological turnover are sensitive tothe quality of the terrestrial fossil record, our findings suggest greaterecological pressure from the end-Triassic mass extinction on terrestrialecosystems than marine ecosystems, contributing to more prolongedterrestrial ecological flux.

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ORCID for Alison T. Cribb: orcid.org/0000-0002-8604-6100

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