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Re: Giant herbivorous theropod body mass evolution



From: Ben Creisler
bcreisler@gmail.com

The paper is now online and the pdf is free till the end of November:


Lindsay E. Zanno & Peter J Makovicky (2012) [2013]
No evidence for directional evolution of body mass in herbivorous
theropod dinosaurs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280 (1751):
20122526
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2526
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1751/20122526.abstract?sid=cbfc3b3b-2178-43f0-9923-381e5ba38f6b

free pdf download:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1751/20122526.full.pdf+html


The correlation between large body size and digestive efficiency has
been hypothesized to have driven trends of increasing mass in
 herbivorous clades by means of directional selection. Yet, to date,
few studies have investigated this relationship from a phylogenetic
 perspective and none, to our knowledge, with regard to trophic
shifts. Here, we reconstruct body mass in the three major subclades of
 non-avian theropod dinosaurs whose ecomorphology is correlated with
extrinsic evidence of at least facultative herbivory in the fossil
 record – all of which also achieve relative gigantism (more than 3000
kg). Ordinary least-squares regressions on natural logtransformed mean
 mass recover significant correlations between increasing mass and
geologic time. However, tests for directional evolution in body mass
 find no support for a phylogenetic trend, instead favouring passive
models of trait evolution. Cross-correlation of sympatric taxa from
 five localities in Asia reveals that environmental influences such as
differential habitat sampling and/or taphonomic filtering affect the
 preserved record of dinosaurian body mass in the Cretaceous. Our
results are congruent with studies documenting that behavioural and/or
 ecological factors may mitigate the benefit of increasing mass in
extant taxa, and suggest that the hypothesis can be extrapolated to
 herbivorous lineages across geologic time scales.