PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Roopnarine, Peter
AU  - Weik, Allen
AU  - Angielczyk, Kenneth
AU  - Dineen, Ashley
TI  - Stability, incumbency and ecological reorganization after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction
AID  - 10.1101/241638
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 241638
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/01/241638.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/01/241638.full
AB  - The Permian-Triassic mass extinction (PTME) altered macroevolutionary land-scapes by removing incumbent biota. Here, using terrestrial paleocommunities of the Karoo Basin spanning the PTME, we show that a pre-extinction incumbent configuration of biotic interactions made significant ecological re-organizations or macroevolutionary innovations unlikely. The post-PTME ecosystem initially was more likely to be reorganized, but incumbency was re-established by the Middle Triassic. We argue that the stability of the pre-PTME ecosystem, its subsequent loss, and replacement, resulted from the in-fluence of community-level structure and dynamics on species evolution and survival.One sentence summary Biotic incumbency at the end of the Paleozoic, based on community functional organization, was destroyed by the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, allowing the development of novel community types.