The role of vicariance and dispersal on the temporal range dynamics of forest vipers in the Neotropical region.

ABSTRACT: The emergence of the diagonal of open/dry vegetations, including Chaco, Cerrado and Caatinga, is suggested to have acted as a dispersal barrier for terrestrial organisms by fragmenting a single large forest that existed in South America into the present Atlantic and Amazon forests. Here we tested the hypothesis that the expansion of the South American diagonal of open/dry landscapes acted as a vicariant process for forest lanceheads of the genus Bothrops, by analyzing the temporal range dynamics of those snakes. We estimated ancestral geographic ranges of the focal lancehead clade and its sister clade using a Bayesian dated phylogeny and the BioGeoBEARS package. We compared nine Maximum Likelihood models to infer ancestral range probabilities and their related biogeographic processes. The

SUBMITTER: Pontes-Nogueira M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8448354 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature