Accurately recognizing analogs between fossil and modern ecosystems allows paleoecologists to more fully interpret fossil assemblages and modern ecologists to leverage the fossil record to address long-term ecological and environmental changes. However, this becomes increasingly difficult as taxonomic turnover increases the dissimilarity between ecosystems. Here we use a guild-based approach to compare the ecological similarity between Cretaceous cold-seep assemblages preserved in the Pierre Shale surrounding the Black Hills and modern cold-seep assemblages from five previously...

Fish abundance data (fish per m) collected during the MACRO project in Mongolia. We collected fish assemblages in river networks of two different ecoregions, the Forest Steppe (FS) and Grassland (G), in 2017 and 2019.

This dataset contains data from field collections described in the paper: “Shields, R., Pyron, M., Arsenault, E., Thorp, J., Minder, M., Artz, C., Costello, J., Otgonganbat, A., Mendsaikhan, B., Maasri., A. (2022) Geomorphology variables predict fish assemblages for forested and endorheic rivers. Ecology and Evolution. ECE-2021-08-01367”. Stream fishes are restricted to specific environments with appropriate habitats for feeding and reproduction. Interactions between streams and surrounding landscapes influence the availability and type of fish habitat, nutrient...

Climate changes are multivariate in nature, and disentangling the proximal drivers of biotic responses to paleoclimate events requires time series of multiple environmental proxies. We reconstruct a multivariate time series of local environmental change for the early Miocene Newport Member of the Astoria Formation (20.26–18 Ma), using proxies for temperature (δ18O), productivity (δ13C), organic carbon flux (Δδ13C), oxygenation (δ15N), and sedimentary grain size (% mud). Our data suggest increases in productivity and declines in oxygenation...

Dated phylogenies of fossil taxa allow palaeobiologists to estimate the timing of major divergences and placement of extinct lineages, and to test macroevolutionary hypotheses. Recently developed Bayesian ‘tip-dating’ methods simultaneously infer and date the branching relationships among fossil taxa, and infer putative ancestral relationships. Using a previously published dataset for extinct theropod dinosaurs, we contrast the dated relationships inferred by several tip-dating approaches and evaluate potential downstream effects on phylogenetic comparative methods. We also compare...