1. |
- Evans, Alistair R., et al.
(författare)
-
The maximum rate of mammal evolution
- 2012
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 109:11, s. 4187-4190
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant? Achieving such a large transformation calls for major biological reorganization. Thus, the speed at which this occurs has important implications for extensive faunal changes, including adaptive radiations and recovery from mass extinctions. To quantify the pace of large-scale evolution we developed a metric, clade maximum rate, which represents the maximum evolutionary rate of a trait within a clade. We applied this metric to body mass evolution in mammals over the last 70 million years, during which multiple large evolutionary transitions occurred in oceans and on continents and islands. Our computations suggest that it took a minimum of 1.6, 5.1, and 10 million generations for terrestrial mammal mass to increase 100-, and 1,000-, and 5,000-fold, respectively. Values for whales were down to half the length (i.e., 1.1, 3, and 5 million generations), perhaps due to the reduced mechanical constraints of living in an aquatic environment. When differences in generation time are considered, we find an exponential increase in maximum mammal body mass during the 35 million years following the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. Our results also indicate a basic asymmetry in macroevolution: very large decreases (such as extreme insular dwarfism) can happen at more than 10 times the rate of increases. Our findings allow more rigorous comparisons of microevolutionary and macroevolutionary patterns and processes.
|
|
2. |
- Smith, Felisa A, et al.
(författare)
-
The evolution of maximum body size of terrestrial mammals
- 2010
-
Ingår i: Science. - : American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). - 0036-8075 .- 1095-9203. ; 330:6008, s. 1216-1219
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The extinction of dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary was the seminal event that opened the door for the subsequent diversification of terrestrial mammals. Our compilation of maximum body size at the ordinal level by sub-epoch shows a near-exponential increase after the K/Pg. On each continent, the maximum size of mammals leveled off after 40 million years ago and thereafter remained approximately constant. There was remarkable congruence in the rate, trajectory, and upper limit across continents, orders, and trophic guilds, despite differences in geological and climatic history, turnover of lineages, and ecological variation. Our analysis suggests that although the primary driver for the evolution of giant mammals was diversification to fill ecological niches, environmental temperature and land area may have ultimately constrained the maximum size achieved.
|
|
3. |
- Uhen, Mark D., et al.
(författare)
-
The EarthLife Consortium API: an extensible, open-source service foraccessing fossil data and taxonomies from multiple communitypaleodata resources
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Frontiers of Biogeography. - : International Biogeography Society. ; 13:2
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Paleobiologists and paleoecologists interested in studying biodiversity dynamics over broadspatial and temporal scales have built multiple community-curated data resources, eachemphasizing a particular spatial domain, timescale, or taxonomic group(s). This multiplicity ofdata resources is understandable, given the enormous diversity of life across Earth's history,but creates a barrier to achieving a truly global understanding of the diversity and distributionof life across time. Here we present the Earth Life Consortium Application ProgrammingInterface (ELC API), a lightweight data service designed to search and retrieve fossil occurrenceand taxonomic information from across multiple paleobiological resources. Key endpointsinclude Occurrences (returns spatiotemporal locations of fossils for selected taxa), Locales(returns information about sites with fossil data), References (returns bibliographicinformation), and Taxonomy (returns names of subtaxa associated with selected taxa). Dataobjects are returned as JSON or CSV format. The ELC API supports tectonic-driven shifts ingeographic position back to 580 Ma using services from Macrostrat and GPlates. The ELC APIhas been implemented first for the Paleobiology Database and Neotoma PaleoecologyDatabase, with a test extension to the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database. The ELCAPI is designed to be readily extensible to other paleobiological data resources, with allendpoints fully documented and following open-source standards (e.g., Swagger, OGC). Thebroader goal is to help build an interlinked and federated ecosystem of paleobiological andpaleoenvironmental data resources, which together provide paleobiologists, macroecologists,biogeographers, and other interested scientists with full coverage of the diversity anddistribution of life across time.
|
|