Continental Ecosystem Instability During the Late Triassic Rise of Dinosaurs

Our assessment of the Earth system response to future global climate change requires the characterization of feedbacks that occur at temperatures significantly warmer than modern. Patterns derived from hothouse intervals in Earth's past can inform process-based models to better understand and predict such feedbacks. pCO₂ values exceeded 1000 ppm during the Late Triassic (~235 million to 201.5 million years ago), one of the warmest - and one of the most climatically dynamic - intervals in Earth history. This long period of warmth saw rare and species-poor assemblages of early dinosaurs and their relatives at low-paleolatitudes. Here we present new records of palynology, charcoal, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) biomarkers of regional wildfires, and the bulk carbon isotopic composition of organic matter (δ¹³C_org) from fluvial and overbank sediments of the Chinle Formation of the Chama Basin in north-central New Mexico from low paleolatitude Pangea. These data illuminate the climatic and ecological drivers of low dinosaur diversity. Our data suggest that strongly fluctuating but generally very hot and periodically arid environmental conditions prevailed at low paleolatitudes in the Late Triassic. Strong variations in δ¹³C_org and xerophytic palynomorph abundance are highly correlated, suggesting these proxies responded to fluctuating arid conditions with intermittent wildfires, some burning at temperatures reaching at least 680°C. The abundant, reliable food source required by an extensive, diverse community of large-bodied, herbivorous, fast-growing tachymetabolic dinosaurs did not develop until climatic changes in the Early Jurassic. Despite this, the basic structure of this pseudosuchian archosaur-dominated community remained stable over ~10-15 million years.