Gone with the plate: the opening of the Western Mediterranean basin drove the diversification of ground-dweller spiders.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The major islands of the Western Mediterranean--Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands--are continental terrenes that drifted towards their present day location following a retreat from their original position on the eastern Iberian Peninsula about 30 million years ago. Several studies have taken advantage of this well-dated geological scenario to calibrate molecular rates in species for which distributions seemed to match this tectonic event. Nevertheless, the use of external calibration points has revealed that most of the present-day fauna on these islands post-dated the opening of the western Mediterranean basin. In this study, we use sequence information of the cox1, nad1, 16S, L1, and 12S mitochondrial genes and the 18S, 28S, and h3 nuclear genes, along with r

SUBMITTER: Bidegaray-Batista L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3273451 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature