Ancient food webs developed modern structure soon after mass extinction
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - 17:20
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Analysis of a highly detailed picture of feeding relationships among 700 species from a 48 million year old ecosystem provides the most compelling evidence to date that ancient food webs were organized much like modern food webs. The results are significant because they show that the Messel ecosystem developed a modern ecological structure, along with a modern biota, in a relatively brief 18 million year period following Earth's most recent die-off, the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which disrupted ecosystem dynamics on a massive scale and served as a species diversity bottleneck.