Nathan Mazet's research while affiliated with Université de Montpellier and other places

... This can occur when species fail to keep up with a changing environment, leading to extinction becoming more frequent than speciation. More evidence for waxing-waning dynamics has been found in phylogenetic data in recent years, but what triggers them remains elusive (Mazet et al. 2023). ...

... Cycads have long been considered a relict of a once more diverse and globally distributed group (Mamay, 1969;Brenner et al., 2003). Cycads likely originated on the Laurasian landmass during the Carboniferous and expanded on Gondwana during the Jurassic (Coiro et al., 2023). Despite exhibiting little gross morphological change over the last 330 million years, molecular evidence suggests that modern cycads recently and rapidly diversified during the Neogene, a period marked by increasing aridity (Nagalingum et al., 2011;Condamine et al., 2015;Coiro et al., 2023). ...

... ; https://doi.org/10. 1101/2023 rbcL. The study by Cooper et al. (2012b), which estimated the crown age of Lepidoziaceae at 116 Ma, used nine fossil calibrations and a data set comprising only three molecular markers from 212 liverwort species (64 Lepidoziaceae). ...

... It underscores a need to initiate more intensive studies of the butterfly fauna of the Western Ghats, including field surveys and museum inspections. Indeed, extensive sampling, taxonomic reassessments based on modern taxonomic and evolutionary principles, understanding of biogeography and endemism, and molecular phylogenetic analyses, have already led to considerable taxonomic changes to known taxa as well as discoveries of new species in several flagship vertebrate and invertebrate groups (Biju et al. 2014;Condamine et al. 2023;Garg et al. 2017;Joshi et al. 2020;Kunte et al. 2019;Robin et al. 2017). Our discovery of a new Cigaritis takes a further step in building a more robust faunal checklist of the Western Ghats that will help advance the taxonomic, systematic, ecological and evolutionary studies of this iconic biodiversity hotspot. ...

... Elevated extinction of gymnosperms during the Cenozoic has been proposed as a partial explanation for the imbalance in species richness between gymnosperms and angiosperms Condamine et al., 2020), and are retrieved in analyses of both phylogenies (May et al., 2016) and the fossil record (Crepet & Niklas, 2009). Whether such an elevated extinction was driven by one or more events remains hard to infer, but phylogeny-based diversification models unveil an increasing extinction rate in cycads, with diversity decline starting 125 Ma (Mazet et al., 2022). The succession of many cooling events, in the Maastrichtian (Linnert et al., 2014), at the Eocene-Oligocene transition (Houben et al., 2012), the Oligocene-Miocene transition (Beddow et al., 2015), and the mid-Miocene transition, leading to an Icehouse Earth, could have led high-latitude cycads to extinction, and shifted the distribution of the group to more subtropical and tropical latitudes (Meseguer & Condamine, 2020). ...

... Nevertheless, the inclusion of time-varying parameters also has important limitations in terms of identifiability, as highlighted by Louca & Pennel (2020). Fortunately, such limitations are unlikely to apply to SSE models, which are clade-dependent and time-independent (Helmstetter et al., 2022). ...

... In the short time since their publication, LP's (16) findings have generated considerable discussion (e.g., refs. [19][20][21][22], with some authors concluding that they "will be dispiriting to evolutionary scientists" seeking to understand the factors affecting speciation and extinction (20). Our results may serve to lift those spirits, while also illustrating potential subtleties that can arise when reasoning about a limiting concept like identifiability. ...

... Accordingly, previous studies have demonstrated that the extent of diet specialization plays a crucial role in shaping bird species assemblages and the distribution of biodiversity (Belmaker et al., 2012;Benedetti et al., 2022;Morelli et al., 2021) Thus, considering that specialization is linked with the overall extinction risk of species (Boyles & Storm, 2007) since it can reduce adaptability due to increased dependence on specific environmental resources (Begon et al., 2006). Understanding a species' diet, resource usage, habitat and coexisting species is vital for effective conservation efforts (Barnagaud et al., 2019). This relationship can provide invaluable knowledge about the adaptability and resilience of species in various habitats (Benedetti et al., 2022;Morelli et al., 2019Morelli et al., , 2021. ...