Climatic shifts drove major contractions in avian latitudinal distributions throughout the Cenozoic.

ABSTRACT: Many higher level avian clades are restricted to Earth's lower latitudes, leading to historical biogeographic reconstructions favoring a Gondwanan origin of crown birds and numerous deep subclades. However, several such "tropical-restricted" clades (TRCs) are represented by stem-lineage fossils well outside the ranges of their closest living relatives, often on northern continents. To assess the drivers of these geographic disjunctions, we combined ecological niche modeling, paleoclimate models, and the early Cenozoic fossil record to examine the influence of climatic change on avian geographic distributions over the last ∼56 million years. By modeling the distribution of suitable habitable area through time, we illustrate that most Paleogene fossil-bearing localities would have been suita

SUBMITTER: Saupe EE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6601418 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature