Sayol, F;
Steinbauer, M;
Blackburn, T;
Antonelli, A;
Faurby, S;
(2020)
Anthropogenic extinctions conceal widespread evolution of flightlessness in birds.
Science Advances
, 6
(49)
, Article eabb6095. 10.1126/sciadv.abb6095.
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Abstract
Human-driven extinctions can affect our understanding of evolution, through the nonrandom loss of certain types of species. Here, we explore how knowledge of a major evolutionary transition—the evolution of flightlessness in birds—is biased by anthropogenic extinctions. Adding data on 581 known anthropogenic extinctions to the extant global avifauna increases the number of species by 5%, but quadruples the number of flightless species. The evolution of flightlessness in birds is a widespread phenomenon, occurring in more than half of bird orders and evolving independently at least 150 times. Thus, we estimate that this evolutionary transition occurred at a rate four times higher than it would appear based solely on extant species. Our analysis of preanthropogenic avian diversity shows how anthropogenic effects can conceal the frequency of major evolutionary transitions in life forms and highlights the fact that macroevolutionary studies with only small amounts of missing data can still be highly biased.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Anthropogenic extinctions conceal widespread evolution of flightlessness in birds |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1126/sciadv.abb6095 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb6095 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. |
| 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 UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10114086 |
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