Thirty clues to the exceptional diversification of flowering plants.

ABSTRACT:

Background and aims

As angiosperms became one of the megadiverse groups of macroscopic eukaryotes, they forged modern ecosystems and promoted the evolution of extant terrestrial biota. Unequal distribution of species among lineages suggests that diversification, the process that ultimately determines species richness, acted differentially through angiosperm evolution.

Methods

We investigate how angiosperms became megadiverse by identifying the phylogenetic and temporal placement of exceptional radiations, by combining the most densely fossil-calibrated molecular clock phylogeny with a Bayesian model that identifies diversification shifts among evolutionary lineages and through time. We evaluate the effect of the prior number of expected shifts in the phylogenetic tree.

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SUBMITTER: Magallon S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6377106 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature