Early evolution of beetles regulated by the end-Permian deforestation
- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, China
- Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, China
- Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, United States
- Palaeontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation
- Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Linyi University, China
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Abstract
The end-Permian mass extinction (EPME) led to a severe terrestrial ecosystem collapse. However, the ecological response of insects—the most diverse group of organisms on Earth—to the EPME remains poorly understood. Here, we analyse beetle evolutionary history based on taxonomic diversity, morphological disparity, phylogeny, and ecological shifts from the Early Permian to Middle Triassic, using a comprehensive new data set. Permian beetles were dominated by xylophagous stem groups with high diversity and disparity, which probably played an underappreciated role in the Permian carbon cycle. Our suite of analyses shows that Permian xylophagous beetles suffered a severe extinction during the EPME largely due to the collapse of forest ecosystems, resulting in an Early Triassic gap of xylophagous beetles. New xylophagous beetles appeared widely in the early Middle Triassic, which is consistent with the restoration of forest ecosystems. Our results highlight the ecological significance of insects in deep-time terrestrial ecosystems.
Data availability
All source data are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxpvd. In addition, the source data files (Supplementary Data 1-4) have been provided for figures 2-4 and appendix figures 1-10.
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Dataset of Early evolution of beetles regulated by the end-Permian deforestationDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxpvd.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA19050101,XDB26000000)
- Bo Wang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (42125201,41688103)
- Bo Wang
Natural Scientific Founation of Shandong Province (ZR2020YQ27)
- Jun Chen
Russian Science Foundation (21-14-00284)
- Evgeny Yan
Chinese Academy of Sciences (2020VCA0020)
- Edmund A Jarzembowski
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- George H Perry, Pennsylvania State University, United States
Version history
- Received: August 1, 2021
- Preprint posted: October 13, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: November 3, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: November 8, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: November 11, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Zhao et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Early evolution of beetles regulated by the end-Permian deforestation
eLife 10:e72692.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72692
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