Multiple routes to mammalian diversity

Chris Venditti (), Andrew Meade and Mark Pagel ()
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Chris Venditti: University of Hull
Andrew Meade: School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading
Mark Pagel: School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading

Nature, 2011, vol. 479, issue 7373, 393-396

Abstract: The roots of mammalian diversity The textbook view of mammalian evolution is one of an adaptive radiation, in which all the major forms arose to fill the available ecological niches in an explosive burst beginning around 90 million years ago, followed by much slower adaptive change leading up to the present. In a statistical study, Mark Pagel and colleagues track the evolutionary trends in body size for a complete phylogeny of the Mammalia and find no evidence for classic adaptive radiations at any point in history. Rates of speciation and morphological evolution are decoupled and there is no early evolutionary burst. Instead, body size evolution occurs in sporadic bursts across the phylogenetic tree.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1038/nature10516

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