Postdoctoral Fellowship: EAR-PF: The relationship between specialization, environmental change, and extinction risk at the dawn of the Age of Mammals

Modern mammals occupy a remarkable array of environments and vary widely in their degree of specialized diets. For example, modern mammals range from the highly specialized (e.g., the bamboo-eating giant panda) to true generalists (e.g., rats and racoons). Such dietary specialization may be a benefit or liability to species, depending on the environment in which they live. This project aims to understand how ecological specialization in diet relates to evolutionary outcomes in mammals and how environmental change may mediate this relationship, using the fossil record and records of ancient environments. As a result, this project will yield insights into the resilience of species, lineages, and ecosystems. This project will generate multiple opportunities for public participation and science education, including the development of K-12 classroom learning tools and a community science initiative, undergraduate research experiences, and webinars communicating the project’s findings. This project will leverage the exceptional fossil and geological record of the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming to study the evolutionary consequences of dietary specialization during the mid-to-late Paleocene (~60-56 million years ago). Predictions of paleodiet will be generated from 3D models of dental morphology and statistical frameworks used for analyzing clustered or nested data. These dietary predictions will then be used to quantify the relationships between (1) dietary specialization and extinction risk at the level of species, (2) specialization and diversification dynamics at the level of the clade, and (3) taxonomic diversity and functional diversity at the level of the community. As paleoenvironment may mediate the relationship between dietary specialization and evolutionary outcomes, this project will integrate records of ancient environments into these analyses. Taken together the proposed research will shed light on the factors that helped to shape patterns of mammalian biodiversity in the deep past, yielding insights into future and/or ongoing biodiversity change. More broadly, this research will foster public science education and help train the next generation of scientist across multiple education levels and settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.