Estimation of body-mass distributions of Carboniferous tetrapod communities and comparison with modern coastal tropical wetlands

Abstract Coastal tropical wetlands have seen substantial change over the course of Earth’s history. Examining what commonalities lie between ancient tropical wetlands and their modern counterparts allows us to better understand the ecological building blocks foundational to their functioning. We evaluate the similarity of modern and Pennsylvanian tetrapod community structures from coastal tropical wetlands through the lens of body-mass distributions. To obtain fossil body-mass distributions, we expanded upon an existing technique of body-mass estimation in fossil quadrupeds based on the surface areas of the centra of trunk vertebrae. Using this technique, we estimated the body masses of 21 tetrapods from the Pennsylvanian of Joggins and Point Aconi, Nova Scotia, the two assemblages against which we compared modern coastal wetland body-mass distributions. Our results indicate that taphonomic size biases can explain some of the differentiation between the body-mass distributions of Paleozoic terrestrial tetrapod communities in tropical coastal wetlands and their modern counterparts. However, our results also indicate that limitations in the low dietary diversity of Carboniferous tetrapods may have had an impact on body-mass distributions that would have caused them to differ from those of modern coastal tropical wetland ecosystems.