PUBLICATIONS

Below is a list of relevant publications for the GIANTS Project from the core research team.

García-Girón, J., Chiarenza, A.A., Alahuhta, J., … Brusatte, S.L. (2022). Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous. Science Advances, 8(49): eadd5040

Summary and scientific relevance: We quantified the magnitude of ecological change before and after the Cretaceous mass extinction for communities of aquatic and terrestrial vertebrates. We incorporated a simultaneous evaluation of food web and niche dimensions for understanding the palaeobiological context of the mass extinction that laid the foundations for the characteristic terrestrial, lacustrine, and fluvial biotas of today. Our findings were pioneering in demonstrating that (i) non-avian dinosaurs were entrenched in stable niches to which they were supremely well adapted right until the asteroid impact, and (ii) mammals were creating their own advantages through diversifying as the Cretaceous unfolded.

García-Girón, J., Heino, J., Alahuhta, J., … Brusatte, S.L. (2021). Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: the Maastrichtian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study. Palaeontology, 64(3): 335-357.

Summary and scientific relevance: We argued that the fossil record offers a unique deep-time perspective on community organisation, allowing the resolution of phylogenetic and life history settings that are not evident from extant taxa. Specifically, we presented a novel application of metacommunity analysis on the non-avian dinosaur fossil record. This allowed us to better understand spatial patterns of dinosaurian communities and the factors underlying these patterns from large to increasingly finer spatial scales, whether driven by abiotic or biotic agents, thereby contributing to more conventional approaches used to study ancient communities.

García-Girón, J., Heino, J., García-Criado, F., … Alahuhta, J. (2020). Biotic interactions hold the key to understanding metacommunity organisation. Ecography, 43(8): 1180-1190.

Summary and scientific relevance: Our study was the first attempt to empirically integrate different types of biotic interactions into community assembly in a spatial context. We argued that network approaches should help ecologists to determine the spatial scale at which functional relationships are important, and whether such features structure metacommunities. In this regard, our findings supported the notion that biotic interactions make crucial contributions to the species sorting paradigm of metacommunity theory and raised the question of whether these biologically driven signals might have been underappreciated in different ecosystems, thereby expanding ecological research into more realistic scenarios of community organisation.