Tiago B Quental

University of São Paulo | USP · Department of Ecology (IB)

Aim Species richness varies widely across space and is determined by underlying factors that drive species coexistence. Such factors include the speciation process (sympatric vs. allopatric), time since divergence, geographic context and intrinsic properties of the organisms. We model for the first time the coexistence dynamics of lizards and snake...

The notion that biotic interactions affect how populations grow or decline and, as a consequence, whether they persist or perish has been central to the development of ecology and evolutionary theory. Darwin framed evolution as the outcome of intraspecific competition and highlighted the roles of interspecific interactions in driving adaptations. T...

Speciation, dispersal and extinction govern the spatial and temporal dynamics of biodiversity. The fossil record offers the opportunity to directly estimate range expansion and contraction via dispersal and extinction, respectively. However, due to the incomplete occurrence record, determining the dynamics of these processes and the biotic and abio...

The classic paper by Ehrlich and Raven on coevolution will soon be 60 years old. Although they were not the first to develop the idea of coevolution, their thought‐provoking paper certainly popularized this idea and inspired several generations of scientists interested in coevolution. Here we describe some of their main contributions, quantitativel...

The evolution of ecological networks Plants and the animals that eat their fruits and disperse their seeds form complex networks of mutualistic interactions. The structures of many such networks and the ecological forces that shape them are well known, but their deeper evolutionary history has received little attention. Burin et al. address this kn...

To understand the underlying mechanisms generating population genetic divergence and structure is a critical step towards understanding how biodiversity evolves at both micro‐ and macroevolutionary scales. At the population‐level, geographic isolation as well as adaptation to local environmental conditions can generate different patterns of spatial...

The Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K-Pg) episode is an iconic mass extinction, in which the diversity of numerous clades abruptly declined. However, the responses of individual clades to mass extinctions may be more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Here, we examine the diversification dynamics of the three major mammalian clades in North America a...

The fossil record shows that the vast majority of all species that ever existed are extinct and that most lineages go through an expansion and decline in diversity. However, macroevolutionary analyses based upon molecular phylogenies have difficulty inferring extinction dynamics, raising questions about whether the neontological record can contribu...

Phylogenetic data infer temporal clustering of immigration and re-diversification of Australian lizards and snakes, suggesting that climatic and geological changes may have precipitated re-assemblies of this vertebrate group.

The estimation of diversification rates is one of the most vividly debated topics in modern systematics, with considerable controversy surrounding the power of phylogenetic and fossil-based approaches in estimating extinction. Van Valen's seminal work from 1973 proposed the "Law of constant extinction" which states that the probability of extinctio...

A longstanding debate in evolutionary biology and paleontology is whether ecological interactions such as competition impose diversity dependence on speciation and extinction rates. Here we analyze the fossil record of terrestrial mammalian carnivores in North America and Eurasia using a Bayesian framework to assess whether their diversity dynamics...

Background: The diversification dynamics of clades is governed by speciation and extinction processes and is likely affected by multiple biotic, abiotic, and stochastic factors. Using quantitative methods to analyse fossil occurrence data, one may infer rates of speciation and extinction in a Bayesian framework. Moreover, Silvestro et al. (2015a) r...

Snakes of the cosmopolitan family Viperidae comprise around 329 venomous species showing a striking heterogeneity in species richness among lineages. While the subfamily Azemiopinae comprises only two species, 70% of all viper species are arranged in the subfamily Crotalinae or the "pit vipers". The radiation of the pit vipers was marked by the evo...

Diet is commonly assumed to affect the evolution of species, but few studies have directly tested its effect at macro-evolutionary scales. Here, we use Bayesian models of trait-dependent diversification and a comprehensive dietary database of all birds worldwide to assess speciation and extinction dynamics of avian dietary guilds (carnivores, frugi...

Supplementary Figures 1-25, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Notes and Supplementary References.

There is no agreement among palaeobiologists or biologists as towhether, or to what extent, there are limits on diversification and species numbers. Here, we posit that part of the disagreement stems from: (i) the lack of explicit criteria for defining the relevant species pools, which may be defined phylogenetically, ecologically or geographically...

Attempts to infer the ecological drivers of macroevolution in deep time have long drawn inspiration from work on extant systems, but long-term evolutionary and geological changes complicate the simple extrapolation of such theory. Recent efforts to incorporate a more informed ecology into macroevolution have moved beyond the descriptive, seeking to...

Attempts to infer the ecological drivers of macroevolution have long drawn inspiration from work on extant systems, but long-term evolutionary and geological changes complicate the simple extrapolation of such theory into a deep-time setting. Recent efforts to incorporate a more informed ecology into macroevolution have moved beyond the descriptive...

Attempts to infer the ecological drivers of macroevolution have long drawn inspiration from work on extant systems, but long-term evolutionary and geological changes complicate the simple extrapolation of such theory into a deep-time setting. Recent efforts to incorporate a more informed ecology into macroevolution have moved beyond the descriptive...

Lineages arriving on islands may undergo explosive evolutionary radiations owing to the wealth of ecological opportunities. Although studies on insular taxa have improved our understanding of macroevolutionary phenomena, we know little about the macroevolutionary dynamics of continental exchanges. Here we study the evolution of eight Carnivora fami...

Significance Extinction is a ubiquitous feature of biodiversity history, and although many lineages increase in diversity through time, most of them eventually decline and get replaced. Dinosaurs and mammals represent an extreme and iconic example of such replacement. Here we investigate the causes of the sequential wax and wane of three subfamilie...

Background Extinction Diversity results through both the processes of species origination and extinction. However, studies of extinction have tended to focus on mass extinctions, despite the fact that the background extinction represents a greater loss in terms of the absolute number of extinct taxa. In order to identify what factors affect this ra...

Modern survivors of previously more diverse lineages are regarded as living fossils, particularly when characterized by morphological stasis. Cycads are often cited as a classic example, reaching their greatest diversity during the Jurassic-Cretaceous (199.6 to 65.5 million years ago) then dwindling to their present diversity of ~300 species as flo...

The γ statistic through time for a decline diversity scenario without any speciation in the decline phase (last 10 MY). Rates of speciation and extinction used here were chosen to produce the same diversification rates in the rise (speciation = 2.0; extinction = 0.1; r = 1.9) and decline (speciation = 0.0; extinction = 0.2; r = −0.2) phases as used...

Molecular phylogenies have been used to study the diversification of many clades. However, current methods for inferring diversification dynamics from molecular phylogenies ignore the possibility that clades may be decreasing in diversity, despite the fact that the fossil record shows this to be the case for many groups. Here we investigate the mol...

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries a...

Traditionally, patterns and processes of diversification could only be inferred from the fossil record. However, there are an increasing number of tools that enable diversification dynamics to be inferred from molecular phylogenies. The application of these tools to new data sets has renewed interest in the question of the prevalence of diversity-d...

Stingless bees (Meliponini) constitute a diverse group of highly eusocial insects that occur throughout tropical regions around the world. The meliponine genus Melipona is restricted to the New World tropics and has over 50 described species. Melipona, like Apis, possesses the remarkable ability to use representational communication to indicate the...

Over the last two decades, new tools in the analysis of molecular phylogenies have enabled study of the diversification dynamics of living clades in the absence of information about extinct lineages. However, computer simulations and the fossil record show that the inability to access extinct lineages severely limits the inferences that can be draw...

Recent application of time-varying birth-death models to molecular phylogenies suggests that a decreasing diversification rate can only be observed if there was a decreasing speciation rate coupled with extremely low or no extinction. However, from a paleontological perspective, zero extinction rates during evolutionary radiations seem unlikely. He...

We propose a new mechanism based on sexual selection to explain the evolution of diet breadth in insects. More specifically, we show that mate choice in females for certain diet-derived male pheromones can be exploited by maternal effect genes that preferentially place offspring on a specific host plant, resulting in specialization. Our analytical...

We propose a new mechanism based on sexual selection to explain the evolution of diet breadth in insects. More specifically, we show that mate choice in females for certain diet‐derived male pheromones can be exploited by maternal effect genes that preferentially place offspring on a specific host plant, resulting in specialization. Our analytical...

Host-plant mediation in ant-hemipteran mutualisms requires three conditions. First, hemipteran attractiveness to ants should vary with plant quality. Second, ants should preferentially tend those Hemiptera that produce the most nutritious attractant. Third, increased ant attendance based on a richer food reward should have a significant effect on s...

Patterns of population fluctuation, reproductive activity and age structure were studied in populations of the marsupial Micoureus demerarae occupying two small (7.0 and 8.8 ha) fragments of Atlantic Coastal Forest in southeastern Brazil, from 1995 to 1998. Males, but not females, were observed to move between populations. Estimated sizes of the...