Accelerated Diversification Explains the Exceptional Species Richness of Tropical Characoid Fishes.

ABSTRACT: The Neotropics harbor the most species-rich freshwater fish fauna on the planet, but the timing of that exceptional diversification remains unclear. Did the Neotropics accumulate species steadily throughout their long history, or attain their remarkable diversity recently? Biologists have long debated the relative support for these museum and cradle hypotheses, but few phylogenies of megadiverse tropical clades have included sufficient taxa to distinguish between them. We used 1288 ultraconserved element loci spanning 293 species, 211 genera, and 21 families of characoid fishes to reconstruct a new, fossil-calibrated phylogeny and infer the most likely diversification scenario for a clade that includes a third of Neotropical fish diversity. This phylogeny implies paraphyly of the tradition

SUBMITTER: Melo BF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9034337 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature