Matt Friedman1, Kenshu Shimada2,3, Larry D. Martin4, Michael J. Everhart3, Jeff Liston5, Anthony Maltese6 and Michael Triebold6
1Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PR, UK. Solo usuarios registrados se encuentran habilitados a visualizar los enlaces. Gracias por su visita.
2Environmental Science Program and Department of Biological Sciences, DePaul University, 2325 North Clifton Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.
3Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, 3000 Sternberg Drive, Hays, KS 67601, USA.
4Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas, 1345 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.
5Division of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Faculty of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
6Triebold Paleontology and Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, 201 South Fairview Street, Woodland Park, CO 80863, USA.
Large-bodied suspension feeders (planktivores), which include the most massive animals to have ever lived, are conspicuously absent from Mesozoic marine environments. The only clear representatives of this trophic guild in the Mesozoic have been an enigmatic and apparently short-lived Jurassic group of extinct pachycormid fishes. Here, we report several new examples of these giant bony fishes from Asia, Europe, and North America. These fossils provide the first detailed anatomical information on this poorly understood clade and extend its range from the lower Middle Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous, showing that this group persisted for more than 100 million years. Modern large-bodied, planktivorous vertebrates diversified after the extinction of pachycormids at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, which is consistent with an opportunistic refilling of vacated ecospace.
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