Habitat changes and changing predatory habits in North American fossil canids

B Figueirido,A Martín-Serra,C M Janis,Z J Tseng

doi:10.1038/ncomms8976

Abstract

The spread of open grassy habitats and the evolution of long-legged herbivorous mammals with high-crowned cheek teeth have been viewed as an example of coevolution. Previous studies indicate that specialized predatory techniques in carnivores do not correlate with the spread of open habitats in North America. Here we analyse new data on elbow-joint shape for North American canids over the past ∼37 million years and show that incipiently specialized species first appeared along with the initial spread of open habitats in the late Oligocene. Elbow-joint morphologies indicative of the behavior of modern pounce-pursuit predators emerged by the late Miocene coincident with a shift in plant communities from C3 to C4 grasses. Finally, pursuit canids first emerged during the Pleistocene. Our results indicate that climate change and its impact on vegetation and habitat structure can be critical for the emergence of ecological innovations and can alter the direction of lineage evolution.

Highlights

The spread of open grassy habitats and the evolution of long-legged herbivorous mammals with high-crowned cheek teeth have been viewed as an example of coevolution
We use the impressive and well-documented fossil record of North American canids[17,18,19] to test if their inferred locomotor/ predatory behaviour was influenced by Cenozoic environmental change towards open habitats, as has been documented in the contemporaneous large herbivores[8,11,14]
We show that: (i) early Oligocene canids were all generalized ambushers; (ii) more cursorial borophagine canids incipiently specialized towards pounce-pursuit predation appeared along with the initial spread of open habitats in the late Oligocene; (iii) a second incipient specialization towards pounce-pursuit predation appeared within early cursorial canine canids, morphologies of

Summary

Introduction

The spread of open grassy habitats and the evolution of long-legged herbivorous mammals with high-crowned cheek teeth have been viewed as an example of coevolution. We demonstrate that the evolution of predatory behaviour in North American canids (for example, foxes and wolves; family Canidae) has been influenced by climatic and environmental transformation over the later Cenozoic (the past B37 million years (Myr ago)). During this time, Earth’s climate underwent a profound transition in higher latitudes, from climates that were warmer and more humid than today to a later cooling which resulted in increasingly modern climatic regimes[10]. Our results demonstrate that climate change and its impact on vegetation and habitat structure can be critical for the emergence of ecological innovations and can alter the direction of lineage evolution

Methods

Results

Conclusion