PREY - PREDATOR INTERACTION IN SPACE AND TIME

摘要

Predator - prey interaction has an incredibly long geological history since the Precambrian. Predation exerts considerable biological pressure that results in large scale evolutionary trends in many groups especially marine taxa. Tempo of predation intensity varies with time and during the Middle to Late Mesozoic the predation pressure reached a peak, which is famously known as Mesozoic marine revolution (Vermeij, 1977). We previously documented the impact of Mesozoic marine revolution on major marine groups (Bardhan and Chattopadhyay, 2003). Changes of large scale evolutionary trends of major marine groups during the Mesozoic have been ingrained in classical palaeontological text books, but reasons were not explicit. Here, an attempt has been made to reemphasize the role of predation in shaping the evolutionary trends.