Documenting the patterns and potential associated processes of ancient biotas has always been a central challenge in palaeontology. Over recent decades, intense debate has focused on the organization of dinosaur‐dominated communities, yet no general consensus has been reached on how these communities were organized in a spatial context. Here, we used analytical routines typically applied in metacommunity ecology to provide novel insights into dinosaurian distributions across the latest Cretaceous of North America. To do this, we combined fossil occurrences with functional, phylogenetic and palaeoenvironmental modelling, and adopted the perspective that more reasonable conclusions on palaeoecological reconstructions can be gained from studies that consider the organization of biotas along ecological gradients at multiple spatial scales. Our results showed that dinosaurs were restricted in range to different parts of the Hell Creek Formation, prompting the recognition of discrete and compartmentalized faunal areas during the Maastrichtian at fine‐grained scales, whereas taxa with the broadest ranges included those with narrower distributions when combining data from various geological formations across the Western Interior of North America. Although groups of dinosaurs had coincident range boundaries, their communities responded to multiple ecologically‐important gradients when compensating for differences in sampling effort. Metacommunity structures of both ornithischians and theropods were correlated with climatic barriers and potential trophic relationships between herbivores and carnivores, thereby suggesting that dinosaurian faunas were shaped by physiological constraints, limited food resources abundance, and a combination of bottom‐up and top‐down forces across multiple spatial grains and extents.

中文翻译：

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古生物学与元社区生态相遇：以北美马斯特里赫特恐龙化石记录为例

记录古生物群的模式和潜在的相关过程一直是古生物学的主要挑战。在过去的几十年中，激烈的辩论一直集中在以恐龙为主的社区的组织上，但是，关于如何在空间背景下组织这些社区尚未达成共识。在这里，我们使用了通常在超群落生态学中应用的分析程序，以提供有关北美最新白垩纪恐龙分布的新颖见解。为此，我们将化石的发生与功能，系统发育和古环境建模相结合，并采用了这样一种观点，即从考虑到多个空间尺度上沿生态梯度的生物群组织的研究中可以获得关于古生态重建的更合理的结论。我们的研究结果表明，恐龙被限制在地狱溪形成的不同区域，促使人们在马斯特里赫特时期以细粒度识别出离散的和分隔的动物区系，而结合数据时，范围最广的分类单元包括分布较窄的类群。来自北美西部内陆的各种地质​​构造。尽管恐龙群具有一致的范围边界，但它们的群落在补偿采样工作量差异时对多个生态学上重要的梯度做出了响应。鸟类和兽脚类动物的超群落结构与气候障碍以及食草动物和食肉动物之间潜在的营养关系相关，从而表明恐龙的动物群受到生理限制的影响，