ArticlePLoS biology2012
Speciation and extinction drive the appearance of directional range size evolution in phylogenies and the fossil record.
Article in PLoS biology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals.Nature communications · 2025Article
- What are patterns of rise and decline?Royal Society open science · 2023Review
- Genomic insights into recent species divergence in Nicotiana benthamiana and natural variation in Rdr1 gene controlling viral susceptibility.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2022Article
- Species-range-size distributions: Integrating the effects of speciation, transformation, and extinction.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Evolutionary legacies in contemporary tetrapod imperilment.Ecology letters · 2021Article
- How predictable is extinction? Forecasting species survival at million-year timescales.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- Estimating Age-Dependent Extinction: Contrasting Evidence from Fossils and Phylogenies.Systematic biology · 2018Article
- Article
- Phylogenetically informed spatial planning is required to conserve the mammalian tree of life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Progress to extinction: increased specialisation causes the demise of animal clades.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- The impact of Cenozoic cooling on assemblage diversity in planktonic foraminifera.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Energetic Constraints on Species Coexistence in Birds.PLoS biology · 2016Article
- Environmental Predictors of Diversity in Recent Planktonic Foraminifera as Recorded in Marine Sediments.PloS one · 2016Article
- How tree species fill geographic and ecological space in eastern North America.Annals of botany · 2015Article
- Unifying ecology and macroevolution with individual-based theory.Ecology letters · 2015Article
- Dispersal and the transition to sympatry in vertebrates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Bayesian estimation of speciation and extinction from incomplete fossil occurrence data.Systematic biology · 2014Article
- Faster speciation and reduced extinction in the tropics contribute to the Mammalian latitudinal diversity gradient.PLoS biology · 2014Article
- An inordinate fondness for eukaryotic diversity.PLoS biology · 2012Article
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While the geographic range of a species is a fundamental unit of macroecology and a leading predictor of extinction risk, the evolutionary dynamics of species' ranges remain poorly understood. Based on statistical associations between range size and species age, many studies have claimed support for general models of range evolution in which the area occupied by a species varies predictably over the course of its life. Such claims have been made using both paleontological data and molecular estimates of the age of extant species. However, using a stochastic model, we show that the appearance of trends in range size with species' age can arise even when range sizes have evolved at random through time. This occurs because the samples of species used in existing studies are likely to be biased with respect to range size: for example, only those species that happened to have large or expanding ranges are likely to survive to the present, while extinct species will tend to be those whose ranges, by chance, declined through time. We compared the relationship between the age and range size of species arising under our stochastic model to those observed across 1,269 species of extant birds and mammals and 140 species of extinct Cenozoic marine mollusks. We find that the stochastic model is able to generate the full spectrum of empirical age-area relationships, implying that such trends cannot be simply interpreted as evidence for models of directional range size evolution. Our results therefore challenge the theory that species undergo predictable phases of geographic expansion and contraction through time.
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