Reliable biogeography requires fossils: insights from a new species-level phylogeny of extinct and living carnivores.
Name
faurby-et-al-2024-reliable-biogeography-requires-fossils-insights-from-a-new-species-level-phylogeny-of-extinct-and.pdf
Description
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Size
1.11 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Journal article
Date published
August 7, 2024
Abstract
A central objective of historical biogeography is to understand where clades originated and how they moved across space and over time. However, given the dynamic history of ecosystem changes in response to climate change and geological events, the manifold long-distance dispersals over evolutionary timescales, and regional and global extinctions, it remains uncertain how reliable inferences based solely on extant taxa can be achieved. Using a novel species-level phylogeny of all known extant and extinct species of the mammalian order Carnivora and related extinct groups, we show that far more precise and accurate ancestral areas can be estimated by fully integrating extinct species into the analyses, rather than solely relying on extant species or identifying ancestral areas only based on the geography of the oldest fossils. Through a series of simulations, we further show that this conclusion is robust under realistic scenarios in which the unknown extinct taxa represent a biased subset of all extinct species. Our results highlight the importance of integrating fossil taxa into a phylogenetic framework to further improve our understanding of historical biogeography and reveal the dynamic dispersal and diversification history of carnivores.
Project(s)
Priority 2: Trait Diversity and Function
Funder
| Funder name | Awards |
Stiftelsen för Miljöstrategisk Forskning, Sweden | BIOPATH (F 2022/1448) |
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Switzerland | (PCEFP3_187012) |
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom | |
Vetenskapsrådet, Sweden | B0569601 - 2015-04587 - 2019-04739 - 2021-04690 |
Journal title
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Article number
20240473
Publisher
The Royal Society
Place of publication
London, UK
ISSN
0080-4649
eISSN
1471-2954
Date accepted
May 21, 2024
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright
Additional information
IF = 5.531 (2023-2024)