Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #macroevolution
Most recents (3)
1/How did #megaherbivores come into existence? How did they evolve into multitonne sizes? Today we present our results @ScienceMagazine
[science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…]
#macroevolution #brontotheres #paleontology #paleobiology
Here is a 🧵 on our new paper 📄 [1 of 18]
[science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…]
#macroevolution #brontotheres #paleontology #paleobiology
Here is a 🧵 on our new paper 📄 [1 of 18]
2/ The emergence of large animals is a recurrent feature in #evolution. Traditionally, this pattern has been understood as the natural outcome of an almost-universal adaptive advantage of being larger. This notion is generally known as ‘Cope’s rule’.
3/ The mechanism is expected to produce definitive and gradual trends towards large sizes by means of natural selection.
I am very happy to share our last paper on #proboscidean #macroevolution, a fruitful collaboration between paleontologists from Spain, Finland, UK and Argentina. The main conclusions in this thread (1/n)
nature.com/articles/s4155…
nature.com/articles/s4155…
Elephants are almost mystic animals, and the idyllic sight of these giants in the wild may suggest that places like this one in Samburu have been unchanged for millions of years. (2/n)
Photograph by Michael Nichols / National Geographic Society
Photograph by Michael Nichols / National Geographic Society
But elephants are in fact the last relics of a lineage that just 3 Ma had more than 30 species inhabiting Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. More than 180 species have been described in the fossil record!!! (3/n)
Our preprint of Mammalia-wide evolution -- announcing a new tree of life for 5911 species based on a single DNA matrix and fossil node- and tip-dating. We show how ecology (vagility, latitude, diurnality) best explains living diversity & speciation rates. doi.org/10.1101/504803
2/ Bayesian posterior sets of 10,000 trees are built using a 'backbone-and-patch' framework and 31-gene supermatrix of 4098 species (70% of total). This approach gives realistic uncertainty in branch lengths and topology for comparative analyses of mammalian evolutionary rates.
3/ We show that rates of species diversification vary through time: 1) tree wide, with an uptick in lineage turnover near the K-Pg boundary matching that seen in mammal fossils; 2) among lineages, with 24 major rate shifts detected across the tree; and 3) within clades (rodents!)
