Abstract
Due to recent common ancestry, species belonging to the same genus are expected to be more similar with respect to their phenotype, and hence exhibit less niche divergence, than species belonging to different genera. Consequently, congeneric species are expected to compete more intensely for resources, and therefore to be more segregated in space. Yet, despite the longstanding history of this hypothesis of congeneric competitive exclusion, empirical evidence in support of it is at best limited. Here, we analyze co-occurrence patterns of species that belong to the same genera in the mammalian fossil record kept in the NOW database, separately considering Europe during the Neogene, and North America during the Oligocene–Neogene. We assess co-occurrence patterns in comparison to baselines where competitive exclusion is obfuscated through randomization. We find that congeneric species occur together notably less than would be expected at random, with large herbivores being more segregated than large carnivorans and small mammals.
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Notes
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Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Kazakhstan, Moldova, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine.
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Acknowledgments
The chapter was accepted in September 2021. We thank Ana Rosa Gómez Cano and Pasquale Raia for helpful pointers. Research leading to these results was partially supported by the Academy of Finland (grant no. 1314803 to IŽ) and by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 263149).
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All supplementary information is publicly available at Github as Appendix 9.1, https://github.com/zliobaite/patterns_compex. This appendix includes supplementary information about the data and an exhaustive report of our computational experiments, the scripts for performing the analysis on a dump of the NOW database and preparing the associated figures, as well as all our raw results.
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Galbrun, E., Hermansen, J.S., Žliobaitė, I. (2023). Patterns of Competitive Exclusion in the Mammalian Fossil Record. In: Casanovas-Vilar, I., van den Hoek Ostende, L.W., Janis, C.M., Saarinen, J. (eds) Evolution of Cenozoic Land Mammal Faunas and Ecosystems. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17491-9_9
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