DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dfn2z34x9
title: Evolution of ecospace occupancy by Mesozoic marine tetrapods

description: Ecology and morphology are different, and yet in comparative studies of
 fossil vertebrates the two are often conflated. The macroevolution of
 Mesozoic marine tetrapods has been explored in terms of morphological
 disparity, but less commonly using ecological-functional categories. Here
 we use ecospace modelling to quantify ecological disparity across all
 Mesozoic marine tetrapods. We document the explosive radiation of marine
 tetrapod groups in the Triassic and their rapid attainment of high
 ecological disparity. Late Triassic extinctions led to a marked decline in
 ecological disparity, and the recovery of ecospace and ecological
 disparity was sluggish in the Early Jurassic. High levels of ecological
 disparity were again achieved by the Late Jurassic and maintained during
 the Cretaceous, when the ecospace became saturated by the Late Cretaceous.
 Sauropterygians, turtles and ichthyosauromorphs were the largest
 contributors to ecological disparity. Through the Mesozoic, we find that
 established groups remained ecologically conservative and did not explore
 occupied or vacant niches. Several parts of ecospace remained vacant for
 long spans of time. Newly evolved, radiating taxa almost exclusively
 explored unoccupied ecospace, suggesting that abiotic releases are needed
 to empty niches and initiate diversification. In the balance of
 evolutionary drivers in Mesozoic marine tetrapods, abiotic factors were
 key to initiating diversification events, but biotic factors dominated the
 subsequent generation of ecological diversity.
description: The dataset was collected and complied from existing published
 descriptions of marine tetrapod taxa, references are available with the
 data.
description: Supplementary Data
 <strong>Ecospace_data_Reeves_Moon_Benton_Stubbs.xlsx</strong> - Taxa list with ecological character codings, with references. Excluded taxa list, with reasons and references. <strong>Supplementary_Reeves_Moon_Benton_Stubbs. pdf</strong> -  File containing supplementary figures 1-7 <strong>Supplementary S5 - labelled ecospace.pdf </strong>- Seperate file containing supplementary figure 5 <strong>Supplementary S6 - temporal ecospace.tiff </strong>- Seperate file containing supplementary figure 6    R code and data: <strong>READ_ME.txt</strong> - life of file names and contents. <strong>TIME_BINS_FINAL.txt </strong>- geological ages for stage bin <strong>FAD_LAD_2020_Revised.txt</strong> -  geological age data for all taxa, ages are the midpoints of the first bin and last bin <strong>colspoi2020_Revised.csv</strong> - information to allocate colours and symbols in plots and to assign group memberships <strong>EcoNew2020.nex</strong> - ecological character codings in NEXUS format to be loaded in R <strong>ecospace.scores.txt </strong>- NMDS axis 1 and 2 scores  <strong>Eco space.scores.MATLAB</strong> - - NMDS axis 1 and 2 scores for Matlab  <strong>PA_file_clade_MATLAB </strong>- presence/absence data for groups  <strong>PA_TIME_FILE_MATLAB.txt </strong>- presence/absence data for time bins  <strong>PLOT_PCO_PD_RESULTS</strong> - results from MATLAB MDA analysis, for plotting in R <strong>PLOT_NMDS_PD_RESULTS</strong> - results from MATLAB MDA analysis, for plotting in R <strong>PCOa axis scores.txt</strong> - PCOa axis scores, representing ecospace occupation in many dimensions <strong>PCOa axis scores MATLAB</strong> - PCOa axis scores, representing ecospace occupation in many dimensions <strong>packing_expansion_results_PCO.txt</strong> - results from packing analysis based on PCO scores <strong>packing_expansion_results.txt</strong> - results from packing analysis based on NMDS scores <strong>WMPD_results.txt</strong> - WMPD results <strong>eco_nmds.rds</strong> - object with NMDS output, so it does not have to be rerun (takes around 1 hour to run) <strong>R_Code_final.R</strong> - R script used to perform analyses and produce plots (associated function scripts:  bootstrapWMPD.R, GreedySearch.R, StackPlot.R, UpperTriangle.R, xAxisPeriods.R, results of nmds saved as eco_nmds.rds )