Data from: Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: The Maastricthian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

Documenting the patterns and potential associated processes of ancient
biotas has always been a central challenge in palaeontology. Over the last
decades, intense debate has focused on the organisation of
dinosaur–dominated communities, yet no general consensus has been reached
on how these communities were organised in a spatial context and if
primarily affected by abiotic or biotic agents. Here, we used analytical
routines typically applied in metacommunity ecology to provide novel
insights into dinosaurian distributions across the latest Cretaceous of
North America. To do this, we combined fossil occurrences with functional,
phylogenetic and palaeoenvironmental modelling, and adopted the
perspective that more reasonable conclusions on palaeoecological
reconstructions can be gained from studies that consider the organisation
of biotas along ecological gradients at multiple spatial scales. Our
results showed that dinosaurs were restricted in range to different parts
of the Hell Creek Formation, prompting the recognition of discrete and
compartmentalised faunal areas during the Maastrichtian at fine-grained
scales, whereas taxa ranges formed quasi–nested groups when combining data
from various geological formations across the Western Interior of North
America. Although groups of dinosaurs had coincident range boundaries,
their communities responded to multiple ecologically–important gradients
when compensating for differences in sampling effort. Metacommunity
structures of both ornithischians and theropods were correlated with
climatic barriers and potential trophic relationships between herbivores
and carnivores, thereby suggesting that dinosaurian faunas were shaped by
physiological constraints and a combination of bottom-up and top-down
forces across multiple spatial grains and extents.