Kiersten Formoso

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Earth Sciences

Morphology forms the most fundamental level of data in vertebrate palaeontology because it is through interpretations of morphology that taxa are identified, creating the basis for broad evolutionary and palaeobiological hypotheses. Assessing maturity is one of the most basic aspects of morphological interpretation and provides the means to study t...

Biotic crises in Earth’s geologic past offer insight into how environmental perturbations affect the composition of functional guilds within ecosystems. Tiering-motility-feeding ecospace occupation analyses (Bambach et al., 2007; Bush et al., 2007) have successfully been used to characterize marine functional ecology, but similar methods have not y...

Mass extinctions have fundamentally altered the structure of the biosphere throughout Earth's history. The ecological severity of mass extinctions is well studied in marine ecosystems by categorizing marine taxa into functional groups based on ‘ecospace’ approaches, but the ecological response of terrestrial ecosystems to mass extinctions is less w...

Synopsis Land-to-sea evolutionary transitions are great transformations where terrestrial amniote clades returned to aquatic environments. These secondarily aquatic amniote clades include charismatic marine mammal and marine reptile groups, as well as countless semi-aquatic forms that modified their terrestrial locomotor anatomy to varying degrees...

A predominantly fish-eating diet was envisioned for the sail-backed theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus when its elongate jaws with subconical teeth were unearthed a century ago in Egypt. Recent discovery of the high-spined tail of that skeleton, however, led to a bolder conjecture that S. aegyptiacus was the first fully aquatic dinosaur. The...

A predominantly fish-eating diet was envisioned for the sail-backed theropod dinosaur, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus , when its elongate jaws with subconical teeth were unearthed a century ago in Egypt. Recent discovery of the high-spined tail of that skeleton, however, led to a bolder conjecture, that S. aegyptiacus was the first fully aquatic dinosaur....

Fabbri et al.[1] claim that the huge sail-backed dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was a "subaqueous forager," diving underwater in pursuit of prey, based on their measure of bone "compactness." Using thin-sections and computed tomographic (CT) scans of thigh bone (femur) and trunk rib from various living and extinct vertebrates, they claim to be ab...