The Completeness of the Fossil Record of Mesozoic Birds: Implications for Early Avian Evolution
Neil Brocklehurst1*, Paul Upchurch2, Philip D. Mannion1,3, Jingmai O'Connor4,5
1 Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions und Biodiversitätsforschung, Berlin, Germany, 2 Department of Earth Sciences, UCL, London, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, 4 Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China, 5 Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of LA County, Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Abstract
Many palaeobiological analyses have concluded that modern birds (Neornithes) radiated no earlier than the Maastrichtian, whereas molecular clock studies have argued for a much earlier origination. Here, we assess the quality of the fossil record of Mesozoic avian species, using a recently proposed character completeness metric which calculates the percentage of phylogenetic characters that can be scored for each taxon. Estimates of fossil record quality are plotted against geological time and compared to estimates of species level diversity, sea level, and depositional environment. Geographical controls on the avian fossil record are investigated by comparing the completeness scores of species in different continental regions and latitudinal bins. Avian fossil record quality varies greatly with peaks during the Tithonian-early Berriasian, Aptian, and Coniacian–Santonian, and troughs during the Albian-Turonian and the Maastrichtian. The completeness metric correlates more strongly with a ‘sampling corrected’ residual diversity curve of avian species than with the raw taxic diversity curve, suggesting that the abundance and diversity of birds might influence the probability of high quality specimens being preserved. There is no correlation between avian completeness and sea level, the number of fluviolacustrine localities or a recently constructed character completeness metric of sauropodomorph dinosaurs. Comparisons between the completeness of Mesozoic birds and sauropodomorphs suggest that small delicate vertebrate skeletons are more easily destroyed by taphonomic processes, but more easily preserved whole. Lagerstätten deposits might therefore have a stronger impact on reconstructions of diversity of smaller organisms relative to more robust forms. The relatively poor quality of the avian fossil record in the Late Cretaceous combined with very patchy regional sampling means that it is possible neornithine lineages were present throughout this interval but have not yet been sampled or are difficult to identify because of the fragmentary nature of the specimens.
Citation: Brocklehurst N, Upchurch P, Mannion PD, O'Connor J (2012) The Completeness of the Fossil Record of Mesozoic Birds: Implications for Early Avian Evolution. PLoS ONE 7(6): e39056. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039056
Editor: Leon Claessens, College of the Holy Cross, United States of America
Received: November 24, 2011; Accepted: May 15, 2012; Published: June 25, 2012
Copyright: © 2012 Brocklehurst et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: neil.brocklehurst@mfn-berlin.de
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