Invasive species and biodiversity crises: testing the link in the late devonian.

ABSTRACT: During the Late Devonian Biodiversity Crisis, the primary driver of biodiversity decline was the dramatic reduction in speciation rates, not elevated extinction rates; however, the causes of speciation decline have been previously unstudied. Speciation, the formation of new species from ancestral populations, occurs by two primary allopatric mechanisms: vicariance, where the ancestral population is passively divided into two large subpopulations that later diverge and form two daughter species, and dispersal, in which a small subset of the ancestral population actively migrates then diverges to form a new species. Studies of modern and fossil clades typically document speciation by vicariance in much higher frequencies than speciation by dispersal. To assess the mechanism behind Late Devon

SUBMITTER: Stigall AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3012059 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature