A new method for examining the co-occurrence network of fossil assemblages

Autor: Shilong Guo, Wang Ma, Yunyu Tang, Liang Chen, Ying Wang, Yingying Cui, Junhui Liang, Longfeng Li, Jialiang Zhuang, Junjie Gu, Mengfei Li, Hui Fang, Xiaodan Lin, Chungkun Shih, Conrad C. Labandeira, Dong Ren
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Communications Biology, Vol 6, Iss 1, Pp 1-12 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2399-3642
DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-05417-6
Popis: Abstract Currently, studies of ancient faunal community networks have been based mostly on uniformitarian and functional morphological evidence. As an important source of data, taphonomic evidence offers the opportunity to provide a broader scope for understanding palaeoecology. However, palaeoecological research methods based on taphonomic evidence are relatively rare, especially for body fossils in lacustrine sediments. Such fossil communities are not only affected by complex transportation and selective destruction in the sedimentation process, they also are strongly affected by time averaging. Historically, it has been believed that it is difficult to study lacustrine entombed fauna by a small-scale quadrat survey. Herein, we developed a software, the TaphonomeAnalyst, to study the associational network of lacustrine entombed fauna, or taphocoenosis. TaphonomeAnalyst allows researchers to easily perform exploratory analyses on common abundance profiles from taphocoenosis data. The dataset for these investigations resulted from fieldwork of the latest Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation near Daohugou Village, in Ningcheng County of Inner Mongolia, China, spotlighting the core assemblage of the Yanliao Fauna. Our data included 27,000 fossil specimens of animals from this deposit, the Yanliao Fauna, whose analyses reveal sedimentary environments, taphonomic conditions, and co-occurrence networks of this highly studied assemblage, providing empirically robust and statistically significant evidence for multiple Yanliao habitats.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals
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