Contrarian clade confirms the ubiquity of spatial origination patterns in the production of latitudinal diversity gradients.

ABSTRACT: The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), wherein the number of species and higher taxa peaks in the tropics and decreases toward the poles, is the best-documented large-scale diversity pattern on Earth, but hypotheses explaining the standard LDG must also account for rare "contrarian" taxa that show diversity maxima outside of the tropics. For marine bivalves, one of the few groups that provide spatially explicit temporal data on a global scale, we show that a major contrarian group, the Anomalodesmata, unexpectedly exhibits the same large-scale dynamics as related clades having normal LDGs in two key respects. First, maxima in standing genus diversity and genus origination rates coincide spatially. Second, the strength of a clade's present-day LDG is significantly related to the proporti

SUBMITTER: Krug AZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2084308 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature