No evidence for directional evolution of body mass in herbivorous theropod dinosaurs

Lindsay E. Zanno, Peter J. Makovicky

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 log- transformed mean mass recover significant correlations between increasing mass and geological 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 geological time scales.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number20122526
JournalProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Volume280
Issue number1751
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 22 2013
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Body size
  • Cope's rule
  • Diet
  • Ecology
  • Macroevolution
  • Phylogenetic trend

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