The end-Cretaceous mass extinction restructured functional diversity but failed to configure the modern marine biota.

ABSTRACT: The end-Cretaceous (K-Pg) mass extinction shows how large-scale taxonomic loss affects functional diversity over short and long timeframes. In a macroevolutionary model system, we find that, despite losing ~60% of genera and ~20% of family-level diversity, marine bivalves lost only ~5% of their functional diversity, inconsistent with random extinction. Even with evolutionary opportunities presented by a disrupted ecosystem, low-diversity groups prior to the extinction or those originating in the Cenozoic rarely reach higher ranks today, implying long-term diversity ceilings to certain ecological roles. Clades that survived the extinction tend to dominate functions today, 66 million years post-extinction, but both relative richness and phylogenetic structure of those functional groups have

SUBMITTER: Edie SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12094223 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature