Bennett, DJ;
Sutton, MD;
Turvey, ST;
(2019)
How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time.
Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences
, 374
(1788)
, Article 20190210. 10.1098/rstb.2019.0210.
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Abstract
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?’
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1098/rstb.2019.0210 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0210 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10079440 |
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