Permian and Triassic Dicynodont (Therapsida: Anomodontia) Faunas of the Luangwa Basin, Zambia: Taxonomic Update and Implications for Dicynodont Biogeography and Biostratigraphy

Angielczyk, Kenneth D.; Steyer, Jean‐Sébastien; Sidor, Christian A.; Smith, Roger M. H.; Whatley, Robin L.; Tolan, Stephen

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6841-3_7

Cited by 68 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…First, as previously shown for tetrapods (3,4,12,17) the taxonomic composition of assemblages preserved in each basin underwent wholesale revision; there are no species (or genera) found in both Upper Permian and Middle Triassic rocks. Among basins, a second, largerscale transition also occurred.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 84%

“…Importantly, fieldwork has been able to precisely document the stratigraphic position of fossil assemblages such that the fossiliferous Permian beds of Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia are now considered equivalent to the Cistecephalus AZ in South Africa (15,17). In addition, our occurrence data benefit from the personal study of all of the relevant fossils and thus do not rely on the literature being up-to-date.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our work has shown that the four basins preserving Upper Permian fossils (Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia) were, despite markedly different basin architecture and fill, characterized by a single, highly interconnected community during the Permian. Furthermore, the tetrapod fauna was broadly distributed (e.g., ∼2,600 km between the Tanzanian and South African basins) and dominated by dicynodont herbivores, with taxa such as Pristerodon, Oudenodon, Dicynodontoides, and Endothiodon being especially wide-ranging (17).…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction

Sidor

Vilhena²,

Angielczyk

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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In addition to their devastating effects on global biodiversity, mass extinctions have had a long-term influence on the history of life by eliminating dominant lineages that suppressed ecological change. Here, we test whether the end-Permian mass extinction (252.3 Ma) affected the distribution of tetrapod faunas within the southern hemisphere and apply quantitative methods to analyze four components of biogeographic structure: connectedness, clustering, range size, and endemism. For all four components, we detected increased provincialism between our Permian and Triassic datasets. In southern Pangea, a more homogeneous and broadly distributed fauna in the Late Permian (Wuchiapingian, ∼257 Ma) was replaced by a provincial and biogeographically fragmented fauna by Middle Triassic times (Anisian, ∼242 Ma). Importantly in the Triassic, lower latitude basins in Tanzania and Zambia included dinosaur predecessors and other archosaurs unknown elsewhere. The recognition of heterogeneous tetrapod communities in the Triassic implies that the end-Permian mass extinction afforded ecologically marginalized lineages the ecospace to diversify, and that biotic controls (i.e., evolutionary incumbency) were fundamentally reset. Archosaurs, which began diversifying in the Early Triassic, were likely beneficiaries of this ecological release and remained dominant for much of the later Mesozoic.biogeography | complex networks | macroevolution | biotic recovery | paleoecology M ass extinctions are thought to reshape the composition and ecological structure of communities on a scale unparalleled by background extinction (1, 2). Within the terrestrial realm, the replacement of dinosaur-dominated communities by those of mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction is perhaps the best-known example of such wholesale faunal reshuffling. By contrast, understanding the effects of the more massive endPermian extinction on terrestrial community structure has been hampered by the paucity of high-quality geographic data, with nearly all studies restricted to sequences from single basins in Russia (3, 4) or South Africa (5-8). Although some broad similarities have emerged, such as the progressive aridification of the two basins (3, 8) and a heightened diversity of temnospondyl amphibians in the recovery interval (9), limited geographic sampling in each hemisphere constrains the ability of paleontologists to distinguish regional patterns from those characteristic of the individual basins. Moreover, these broadly separated areas are uninformative regarding large-scale (i.e., continentlevel) patterns of faunal evolution.Here we examine tetrapod faunal composition in five fossiliferous areas in southern Pangea approximately 5 million years before and 10 million years after the end-Permian mass extinction. We analyze changes in biogeographic structure with four metrics of taxon occurrence data. First, biogeographic connectedness (BC) quantifies the proportion of taxon-locality occurrences relative to the maximum number of such occurrences possible. Thus...

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Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction

Sidor

Vilhena²,

Angielczyk

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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150

134

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“…Precise interbasinal biostratigraphic correlation for the Ruhuhu and Usili formations is complicated by the fact that the Ruhuhu Basin includes a mix of endemic and widespread taxa, and the stratigraphic ranges of some widespread taxa may not correspond exactly with those in better studied areas such as the Karoo Basin (Angielczyk, 2007;Sidor et al, 2010;Angielczyk et al, 2014aAngielczyk et al, , 2014bHuttenlocker et al, 2015). Based on current understanding of stratigraphic ranges in the Ruhuhu Basin, it seems that the uppermost Ruhuhu and Usili horizons sample a single faunal assemblage (Gay and Cruickshank, 1999;Sidor et al, 2010;Angielczyk et al, 2014a), which can be correlated with the upper Cistecephalus and/or lower Daptocephalus assemblage zones of the Karoo Basin Angielczyk et al, 2014aAngielczyk et al, , 2014b.…”

Section: Tanzaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lopingian tetrapod faunas, yielding skeletal and/or footprint remains, are known from Scotland (Benton and Walker, 1985), Great Britain and Germany (Benton and Walker, 1985;Sues and Boy, 1988), Poland (Ptaszyński and Niedźwiedzki, 2004; though its age is controversial, see Bachman and Kozur, 2004;Nawrocki et al, 2005;Racki, 2005), Italy (Conti et al, 1977), Morocco (Jalil and Dutuit, 1996;Voigt et al, 2010;Hminna et al, 2012), Tunisia (Newell et al, 1976), Malawi (Haughton, 1926;Jacobs et al, 2005;Kruger et al, 2015), Mozambique (Latimer et al, 1995;Castanhinha et al, 2013), Tanzania (Gay and Cruickshank, 1999;Sidor et al, 2010;Angielczyk et al, 2014a), Zimbabwe (Bond, 1973;Gaffney and Mc Kenna, 1979), Zambia (Drysdall and Kitching, 1963;Kemp, 1976;Lee et al, 1997;Angielczyk et al, 2014b), Niger (Sidor et al, 2005;Smith et al, 2015), South Africa (MacRae, 1990;Smith, 1993aSmith, , 1993bDe Klerk, 2002;Ward et al, 2005;Rubidge, 2005;Smith et al, 2012;Rubidge et al, 2016), Madagascar (Mazin and King, 1991;Schoch and Milner, 2000), Brazil (Battail, 2000;…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Late Permian (Lopingian) Terrestrial Ecosystems: A Global Comparison With New Data From the Low Latitude Bletterbach Biota

Petti¹,

Bernardi²,

Kustatscher³

et al. 2017

Geological Society of America Abstracts With Programs

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Keywords:Tetrapoda flora phytoprovinces plant-insect interactions climate endemism latitudinal diversity gradient A B S T R A C TThe late Palaeozoic is a pivotal period for the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems. Generalised warming and aridification trends resulted in profound floral and faunal turnover as well as increased levels of endemism. The patchiness of well-preserved, late Permian terrestrial ecosystems, however, complicates attempts to reconstruct a coherent, global scenario. In this paper, we provide a new reconstruction of the Bletterbach Biota (Southern Alps, NE Italy), which constitutes a unique, low-latitude record of Lopingian life on land. We also integrate floral, faunal (from skeletal and footprint studies), and plant-insect interaction data, as well as global climatic interpretations, to compare the composition of the 14 best-known late Permian ecosystems. The results of this ecosystem-scale analysis provide evidence for a strong correlation between the distribution of the principal clades of tetrapod herbivores (dicynodonts, pareiasaurs, captorhinids), phytoprovinces and climatic latitudinal zonation. We show that terrestrial ecosystems were structured and provincialised at high taxonomic levels by climate regions, and that latitudinal distribution is a key predictor of ecosystem compositional affinity. A latitudinal diversity gradient characterised by decreasing richness towards higher latitudes is apparent: mid-to lowlatitude ecosystems had the greatest amount of high-level taxonomic diversity, whereas those from high latitudes were dominated by small numbers of higher taxa. The high diversities of tropical ecosystems stem from their inclusion of a mixture of late-occurring holdovers from the early Permian, early members of clades that come to prominence in the Triassic, and contemporary taxa that are also represented in higher latitude assemblages. A variety of evidence suggests that the Permian tropics acted as both a cradle (an area with high origination rates) and museum (an area with low extinction rates) for biodiversity.

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Evidence for convergent evolution of a neocortex‐like structure in a late Permian therapsid

Laaß

Kaestner

2017

Journal of Morphology

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The special sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities of mammals mainly depend upon the neocortex, which is the six-layered cover of the mammalian forebrain. The origin of the neocortex is still controversial and the current view is that larger brains with neocortex first evolved in late Triassic Mammaliaformes. Here, we report the earliest evidence of a structure analogous to the mammalian neocortex in a forerunner of mammals, the fossorial anomodont Kawingasaurus fossilis from the late Permian of Tanzania. The endocranial cavity of Kawingasaurus is almost completely ossified, which allowed a less hypothetical virtual reconstruction of the brain endocast to be generated. A parietal foramen is absent. A small pit between the cerebral hemispheres is interpreted as a pineal body. The inflated cerebral hemispheres are demarcated from each other by a median sulcus and by a possible rhinal fissure from the rest of the endocast. The encephalization quotient estimated by using the method of Eisenberg is 0.52, which is 2-3 times larger than in other nonmammalian synapsids. Another remarkable feature are the extremely ramified infraorbital canals in the snout. The shape of the brain endocast, the extremely ramified maxillary canals as well as the small frontally placed eyes suggest that special sensory adaptations to the subterranean habitat such as a well developed sense of touch and binocular vision may have driven the parallel evolution of an equivalent of the mammalian neocortex and a mammal-like lemnothalamic visual system in Kawingasaurus. The gross anatomy of the brain endocast of Kawingasaurus supports the Outgroup Hypothesis, according to which the neocortex evolved from the dorsal pallium of an amphibian-like ancestor, which receives sensory projections from the lemnothalamic pathway. The enlarged brain as well as the absence of a parietal foramen may be an indication for a higher metabolic rate of Kawingasaurus compared to other nonmammalian synapsids.

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Permian and Triassic Dicynodont (Therapsida: Anomodontia) Faunas of the Luangwa Basin, Zambia: Taxonomic Update and Implications for Dicynodont Biogeography and Biostratigraphy

Cited by 68 publications

References 88 publications

Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction

Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction

Late Permian (Lopingian) Terrestrial Ecosystems: A Global Comparison With New Data From the Low Latitude Bletterbach Biota

Evidence for convergent evolution of a neocortex‐like structure in a late Permian therapsid

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