The topography of diet: Orientation patch count predicts diet in turtles.

Use of quantitative morphological methods in biology has increased with the availability of 3D digital data. Rotated orientation patch count (OPCr) leverages such data to quantify the complexity of an animal's feeding surface, and has previously been used to analyze how tooth complexity signals diet in squamates, crocodilians, and mammals. These studies show a strong correlation between dental complexity and diet. However, dietary prediction using this technique has not been tested on the feeding structures of edentulous (toothless) taxa. This study is the first to test the applicability of OPCr to the triturating surface morphology of a beaked clade. Fifty-five turtle specimens, 42 of which preserved both the skull and rhamphotheca, were categorized into dietary categories based on the food sources comprising 90% or 60% of their diets. Photogrammetric models of each specimen were read into molaR, producing OPCr results. Comparison of bone and rhamphotheca OPCr values shows no significant difference in complexity, implying that bone can suffice for predicting diet from morphology when keratin is absent. Carnivorous taxa have significantly lower OPCr values than herbivorous or omnivorous taxa, showing that feeding surface complexity in edentulous animals varies with diet similarly to tooth complexity in toothed taxa. Comparison of bone OPCr values by family shows that Testudinidae (tortoises) are more complex than Cheloniidae (sea turtles) and Chelydridae (snapping turtles), but that Cheloniidae and Chelydridae are not significantly different from each other. We therefore find that OPCr can be used to differentiate between carnivores and other dietary categories in edentulous taxa.

Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math.

We tested the hypothesis that underrepresented students in active-learning classrooms experience narrower achievement gaps than underrepresented students in traditional lecturing classrooms, averaged across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and courses. We conducted a comprehensive search for both published and unpublished studies that compared the performance of underrepresented students to their overrepresented classmates in active-learning and traditional-lecturing treatments. This search resulted in data on student examination scores from 15 studies (9,238 total students) and data on student failure rates from 26 studies (44,606 total students). Bayesian regression analyses showed that on average, active learning reduced achievement gaps in examination scores by 33% and narrowed gaps in passing rates by 45%. The reported proportion of time that students spend on in-class activities was important, as only classes that implemented high-intensity active learning narrowed achievement gaps. Sensitivity analyses showed that the conclusions are robust to sampling bias and other issues. To explain the extensive variation in efficacy observed among studies, we propose the heads-and-hearts hypothesis, which holds that meaningful reductions in achievement gaps only occur when course designs combine deliberate practice with inclusive teaching. Our results support calls to replace traditional lecturing with evidence-based, active-learning course designs across the STEM disciplines and suggest that innovations in instructional strategies can increase equity in higher education.

The first dinosaur from Washington State and a review of Pacific coast dinosaurs from North America.

We describe the first diagnostic dinosaur fossil from Washington State. The specimen, which consists of a proximal left femur, was recovered from the shallow marine rocks of the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Cedar District Formation (Nanaimo Group) and is interpreted as pertaining to a large theropod on the basis of its hollow medullary cavity and proximally placed fourth trochanter. The Washington theropod represents one of the northernmost occurrences of a Mesozoic dinosaur on the west coast of the United States and one of only a handful from the Pacific coast of Laramidia during the Cretaceous. Its isolated nature and preservation in marine rocks suggest that the element was washed in from a nearby fluvial system. If the femur pertains to a tyrannosauroid, which seems likely given its size and the widespread occurrence of the group across Laramidia during Late Cretaceous times, then it would represent an earlier occurrence of large body size than previously recognized (complete femur length estimated at 1.2 meters). Uncertainty surrounding the latitude of deposition of the Nanaimo Group (i.e., the Baja-British Columbia hypothesis) precludes assigning the Washington theropod to either of the putative northern or southern biogeographic provinces of Laramidia.

Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction.

In addition to their devastating effects on global biodiversity, mass extinctions have had a long-term influence on the history of life by eliminating dominant lineages that suppressed ecological change. Here, we test whether the end-Permian mass extinction (252.3 Ma) affected the distribution of tetrapod faunas within the southern hemisphere and apply quantitative methods to analyze four components of biogeographic structure: connectedness, clustering, range size, and endemism. For all four components, we detected increased provincialism between our Permian and Triassic datasets. In southern Pangea, a more homogeneous and broadly distributed fauna in the Late Permian (Wuchiapingian, ∼257 Ma) was replaced by a provincial and biogeographically fragmented fauna by Middle Triassic times (Anisian, ∼242 Ma). Importantly in the Triassic, lower latitude basins in Tanzania and Zambia included dinosaur predecessors and other archosaurs unknown elsewhere. The recognition of heterogeneous tetrapod communities in the Triassic implies that the end-Permian mass extinction afforded ecologically marginalized lineages the ecospace to diversify, and that biotic controls (i.e., evolutionary incumbency) were fundamentally reset. Archosaurs, which began diversifying in the Early Triassic, were likely beneficiaries of this ecological release and remained dominant for much of the later Mesozoic.