ugh five-day late fomo... shouting "CHROMATE TOWEL GRAPHY" at my phone to feel like I was involved

A lot of future work to be done with this terrestrial ecospace cube! I am so excited that it’s out in the world now, and I do hope that others working on terrestrial ecosystem change in the fossil record can find it useful!

TLDR: the end-Triassic mass extinction event was more ecologically severe on land than it was in the oceans!

The most likely environmental explanation for this prolonged terrestrial instability is due to turnovers in plant communities in the wake of the mass extinction event. Food chains probably get weird, and the ecospace responds accordingly! 🌱🦕

Whether this is a quirk of the quality of the fossil record or not, this demonstrates a clear trend that ecologically depauperate communities are extremely slow to recover after mass extinction events.

We are by no means the first to suggest that the ETE was more severe on land in the oceans, but these new findings suggest that it was likely because low taxonomic redundancy in functional groups leads to severe ecological instabilities.

There’s a lot in this paper. But our main finding is that while marine ecosystems returned to ecological stability by the Sinemurian, terrestrial ecosystems were in a prolonged state of ecological flux and turnover well into the Aalenian. Why is this?

We applied this to marine and terrestrial data across the end-Triassic mass extinction (ETE) to compare how marine and terrestrial ecosystems responded to a catastrophic climate change event… and we did find that the marine and terrestrial realms respond very differently!

First… we made a new terrestrial ecospace cube! Similar to the traditional marine ecospace we know and love, the terrestrial ecospace is composed of tiering, motility, and feeding traits. This allows us to classify terrestrial and marine fauna into analogous functional groups!

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 I am over the moon that our new paper, “Contrasting terrestrial and marine ecospace dynamics after the end-Triassic mass extinction event” is out in @RSocPublishing Proceedings B today! 🔗: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs… So what’s this all about? 🧵