DOI: 10.5061/dryad.s8s72md
title: Data from: Quantifying successional change and ecological similarity among cretaceous and modern cold-seep faunas

description: Accurately recognizing analogs between fossil and modern ecosystems allows
 paleoecologists to more fully interpret fossil assemblages and modern
 ecologists to leverage the fossil record to address long-term ecological
 and environmental changes. However, this becomes increasingly difficult as
 taxonomic turnover increases the dissimilarity between ecosystems. Here we
 use a guild-based approach to compare the ecological similarity between
 Cretaceous cold-seep assemblages preserved in the Pierre Shale surrounding
 the Black Hills and modern cold-seep assemblages from five previously
 recognized biofacies. We modify modern assemblage data to include only
 those taxa with fossilizable hardparts greater than 5 mm in length to make
 these modern datasets more comparable to potential fossil analogs. We find
 that while the Black Hills assemblages are more similar in ecological
 guild composition to the modern thyasirid biofacies, subsets share
 similarities in ecological structure to the lucinid and mussel bed
 biofacies. The fossil seep assemblages are also more similar to each other
 than are modern assemblages belonging to the same biofacies, despite
 greater geographic and temporal dissimilarity among the fossil samples.
 Furthermore, guild-level ordination analyses show a secondary faunal
 gradient that reflects community succession in the hard-substrate
 dominated modern assemblages and reveals a parallel faunal gradient in the
 soft-sediment dominated Cretaceous assemblages, consistent with a gradient
 in the influence of seep fluids on the faunas. Thus, while the Black Hills
 assemblages are quite homogeneous in their composition, they capture
 ecological variation similar to successional patterns in modern seep
 systems.
description: SupplementalTable1Cataloged South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Museum of Geology specimens used in our analyses. Includes SDSM catalog numbers, sample numbers used in the publication, locality names, and taxon names.SupplementalTable2Taxon abundance data for all fossil samples used in our analyses. Includes taxon name, guild assignment (see Table 3 of publication for guild definitions), and faunal counts. AMNH denotes samples from the American Museum of Natural History published in Meehan and Landman 2016. RR denotes Richards Ranch samples. MOG refers to SDSMT Museum of Geology collections.SupplementalTable3rTaxonomic abundance data for all modern assemblages we included in our analyses. Includes the taxonomic identification of the original authors (with any taxonomic synonymizations from WORMS in parentheses), our justification for excluding the taxon from our analyses if excluded, the guild assignment (see Table 3 of publication for guild definitions), and taxonomic counts. TW=tube worm biofacies, MB=mussel biofacies, LB=lucinid biofacies, TB=thyasirid biofacies and are all from the Gulf of Mexico. R#_Dando1991 are thyasirid biofacies from the North Sea.SupplementalTable4Mann-Whitney p-values (with Bonferroni correction) for pairwise comparisons of ecological metrics among faunal datasets.