Tanner Publishes Essay in Nature, Quoted Widely Following Groundbreaking Dinosaur Research

Following publication of an article that appeared on Wednesday, Nov. 27 in the weekly British scientific journal Nature, Larry Tanner, Ph.D., professor of biological and environmental studies at Le Moyne College, was quoted in nearly 1,000 media articles around the world on the significance of research findings that shed new light on how dinosaur’s diets allowed them to dominate the planet. Tanner was also invited by Nature, widely considered to be the most reputable science journal in the world, to write an essay for the News & Views section of the journal to explain the significance of the research.

The Nature article is headlined “Digestive contents and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy.” In describing the research methodology, the article’s abstract states “Here we use hundreds of fossils with direct evidence of feeding to compare trophic dynamics across five vertebrate assemblages that record this event… to suggest that the processes shown… may explain global patterns, shedding new light on the environmentally governed emergence of dinosaur dominance and gigantism that endured until the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.”

Tanner was not part of the study but two of his research papers are footnoted in the research. In stories that appear on major news sites including NPR, CNN and Yahoo News, Tanner comments on the magnitude of the research, stating “People have collected and classified coprolites for decades, even hundreds of years but no one has studied them in this detail before…What we need now is to try to see if we can see the same sorts of transitions between animal groups at other locations.” Listen to the national NPR story here.(Tanner’s remarks start at around the 2:35 mark.)