Foffa, Davide;
Dunne, Emma;
Chiarenza, A Alessandro;
Wynd, Brenen M;
Farnsworth, Alexander;
Lunt, Daniel J;
Valdes, Paul;
... Barrett, Paul M; + view all
(2025)
Climate drivers and palaeobiogeography of lagerpetids and early pterosaurs.
Nature Ecology and Evolution
10.1038/s41559-025-02767-8.
(In press).
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Abstract
The origin of pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, is poorly understood, owing to the temporal and morphological gaps that separate them from their closest non-flying relatives, the lagerpetids. Although both groups coexisted during the Late Triassic, their limited sympatry is currently unexplained, indicating that ecological partitioning, potentially linked to palaeoclimate, influenced their early evolution. Here we analysed pterosauromorph (pterosaur + lagerpetid) palaeobiogeography using phylogeny-based probabilistic methods and integrating fossil occurrences with palaeoclimate data. Our results reveal distinct climatic preferences and dispersal histories: lagerpetids tolerated a broader range of conditions, including arid belts, enabling a widespread distribution from the Middle to early Late Triassic. Conversely, pterosaurs preferred wetter environments, resulting in a patchier geographical distribution that expanded only as humidity increased in the Late Triassic, probably following the Carnian Pluvial Event. This major environmental disturbance, potentially driven by changes in CO2-related thermal constraints and/or palaeogeography, appears to have had a key role in shaping early pterosauromorph evolution by promoting spatial segregation and distinct climatic niche occupation.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Climate drivers and palaeobiogeography of lagerpetids and early pterosaurs |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41559-025-02767-8 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02767-8 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209936 |
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