of the National Academy of Sciences. Each ecological group includes a set of species that share the same set of potential predators and prey. Silhouettes show iconic members of each group. Arrows show who eats whom. Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Mitchell, Peter Roopnarine and Kenneth Angielczyk "Our analyses show that more species became extinct for a given plant die-off in the youngest communities," Mitchell said. "We can trace this difference in response to changes in a number of key ecological groups such as plant-eating dinosaurs like Triceratops and small mammals." The results of Mitchell and his colleagues paint a picture of late Cretaceous North America in which pre-extinction changes to food webs -- likely driven by a combination of environmental and biological factors -- results in communities that were more fragile when faced with large disturbances. The team's computer model describes all plausible diets for the animals under study. In one run, Tyrannosaurus might eat only Triceratops, while in another it eats only duck-billed dinosaurs, and in a third it might eat a more varied diet. This stems from the uncertainty regarding exactly what Cretaceous animals ate, but this uncertainty actually worked to the study's benefit. "Using modern food webs as guides, what we have discovered is that this uncertainty is far less important to understanding ecosystem functioning than is our general knowledge of the diets and the number of different species that would have had a particular diet," Angielczyk said. Data derived from modern food webs helped the simulations