Environmentally driven extinction and opportunistic origination explain fern diversification patterns.

ABSTRACT: Combining palaeontological and neontological data offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relative roles of biotic and abiotic controls of species diversification, and the importance of origination versus extinction in driving evolutionary dynamics. Ferns comprise a major terrestrial plant radiation with an extensive evolutionary history providing a wealth of modern and fossil data for modelling environmental drivers of diversification. Here we develop a novel Bayesian model to simultaneously estimate correlations between diversification dynamics and multiple environmental trajectories. We estimate the impact of different factors on fern diversification over the past 400 million years by analysing a comprehensive dataset of fossil occurrences and complement these findings by analysi

SUBMITTER: Lehtonen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5500532 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature