Trait-Based Paleontological Niche Prediction Recovers Extinct Ecological Breadth of the Earliest Specialized Ant Predators

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2023

Abstract

Paleoecological estimation is fundamental to the reconstruction of evolutionary and environmental histories. The ant fossil record preserves a range of species in three-dimensional fidelity and chronicles faunal turnover across the Cretaceous and Cenozoic; taxonomically rich and ecologically diverse, ants are an exemplar system to test new methods of paleoecological estimation in evaluating hypotheses. We apply a broad extant ecomorphological dataset to evaluate random forest machine learning classification in predicting the total ecological breadth of extinct and enigmatic hell ants. In contrast to previous hypotheses of extinction-prone arboreality, we find that hell ants were primarily leaf litter or ground-nesting and foraging predators, and by comparing ecospace occupations of hell ants and their extant analogs, we recover a signature of ecomorphological turnover across temporally and phylogenetically distinct lineages on opposing sides of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. This paleoecological predictive framework is applicable across lineages and may provide new avenues for testing hypotheses over deep time.

Identifier

85173773644 (Scopus)

Publication Title

American Naturalist

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1086/726739

e-ISSN

15375323

ISSN

00030147

PubMed ID

38033183

First Page

E147

Last Page

E162

Issue

6

Volume

202

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