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How the past impact...
How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time
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- Bennett, Dominic J. (author)
- Gothenburg University,Göteborgs universitet,Institutionen för biologi och miljövetenskap,Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
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Sutton, M. D. (author)
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Turvey, S. T. (author)
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(creator_code:org_t)
- 2019-11-04
- 2019
- English.
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In: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 1471-2970. ; 374:1788
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Abstract
Subject headings
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- How does past evolutionary performance impact future evolutionary performance? This is an important question not just for macroevolutionary biologists who wish to chart the phenomena that describe deep-time changes in biodiversity but also for conservation biologists, as evolutionarily distinct species-which may be deemed 'low-performing' in our current era-are increasingly the focus of conservation efforts. Contrasting hypotheses exist to account for the history and future of evolutionarily distinct species: on the one hand, they may be relicts of large radiations, potentially 'doomed' to extinction; or they may be slow-evolving, 'living fossils', likely neither to speciate nor go extinct; or they may be seeds of future radiations. Here, we attempt to test these hypotheses in Mammalia by combining a molecular phylogenetic supertree with fossil record occurrences and measuring change in evolutionary distinctness (ED) at different time slices. With these time slices, we modelled future ED as a function of past ED. We find that past evolutionary performance does indeed have an impact on future evolutionary performance: the most evolutionarily isolated clades tend to become more evolutionarily distinct with time, indicating that low-performing clades tend to remain low-performing throughout their evolutionary history. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?'
Subject headings
- NATURVETENSKAP -- Biologi -- Evolutionsbiologi (hsv//swe)
- NATURAL SCIENCES -- Biological Sciences -- Evolutionary Biology (hsv//eng)
Keyword
- evolutionary distinctness
- evolutionary potential
- fossil record
- living fossil
- mammalia
- phylogeny
- article
- cladistics
- mammal
- nonhuman
Publication and Content Type
- ref (subject category)
- art (subject category)
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