Tetrapod species-area relationships across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction

Mass extinctions are rare but catastrophic events that profoundly disrupt biodiversity. Widelyaccepted consequences of mass extinctions, such as biodiversity loss and the appearance of temporary ‘disaster taxa,’ imply that nested species-area relationships (SARs, or how biodiversity scales with area) should change dramatically across these events: specifically, both the slope (reflecting the rate of accumulation of new species with increasing area) and intercept (reflecting the density of species at local scales) of the power-law relationship should decrease. However, these hypotheses have not been tested, and the contribution of variation in the SAR to diversity dynamics in deep time has been neglected. We use fossil data to quantify nested SARs in North American terrestrial tetrapods through the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) mass extinction (Campanian–Ypresian). SARs vary substantially through time and among groups. In the pre-extinction interval (Maastrichtian), unusually shallow SAR slopes (indicating low beta diversity or provinciality) drive low total regional diversity in dinosaurs, mammals and other tetrapods. In the immediate post-extinction interval (Danian), the explosive diversification of mammals drove high regional diversity via a large increase in SAR slope (indicating higher beta diversity or provinciality), and only a limited increase in SAR intercept (suggesting limited diversity change at small scales). This contradicts the expectation that post-extinction biotas should be regionally homogenized by the spread of disaster taxa and impoverished by diversity loss. This early post-extinction increase in SAR slope was followed in the Thanetian–Selandian ( ∼ 4.4. myr later) by increases in the intercept, indicating that diversity dynamics at local and regional scales did not change in synchrony. These results demonstrate the importance of SARs for understanding deep-time diversity dynamics, particularly the spatial dynamics of recovery from mass extinctions.