2013/07/10 by Jordan C. Mallon, Jason S. Anderson · 6 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology #Evolution and Paleontology Studies #Amphibian and Reptile Biology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067182
openalex publication_date 2013/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Megaherbivorous dinosaur coexistence on the Late Cretaceous island continent of Laramidia has long puzzled researchers, owing to the mystery of how so many large herbivores (6-8 sympatric species, in many instances) could coexist on such a small (4-7 million km(2)) landmass. Various explanations have been put forth, one of which-dietary niche partitioning-forms the focus of this study. Here, we apply traditional morphometric methods to the skulls of megaherbivorous dinosaurs from the Dinosaur Park Formation (upper Campanian) of Alberta to infer the ecomorphology of these animals and to test the niche partitioning hypothesis. We find evidence for niche partitioning not only among contemporaneous ankylosaurs, ceratopsids, and hadrosaurids, but also within these clades at the family and subfamily levels. Consubfamilial ceratopsids and hadrosaurids differ insignificantly in their inferred ecomorphologies, which may explain why they rarely overlap stratigraphically: interspecific competition prevented their coexistence.