Case Vincent Miller

I. INTRODUCTION Troodontidae are a group of small, bird-like theropods belonging to the clade Paraves. The clade is defined as a stem-based monophyletic group containing Troodon formosus and all coelurosaurians closer to it than to Velociraptor mongoliensis or Passer domesticus (Turner, Makovicky & Norell, 2012) (Fig. 1).

The concept of circadian rhythms is quite intuitive: life on Earth needs to be able to anticipate predictable changes in the environment – and take advantage of them. Thus, in most species, a wide range of bodily functions and behaviors are optimized to the time-of-day. Moreover, the disruption of circadian rhythms diminishes survival in the wild, and increases the risk of many diseases in humans (Lane et al., 2023).

eLife assessment This important study explores numerous lines of evidence for the surprisingly diverse diets of a group of toothed birds that lived over 100 million years ago. The large amount of data the authors collected forms a solid dataset. The methods might in principle be extensible to other limbed vertebrates, although there are concerns regarding some of the details.