ArticlePLoS biology2012
Clade age and species richness are decoupled across the eukaryotic tree of life.
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 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- The convergent evolution of the pelvic suction cup: A unique key innovation in spiny-finned fishes.Science advances · 2026Article
- Review
- The causes of species richness patterns among clades.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The radiation continuum and the evolution of frog diversity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Bird clades with less complex appendicular skeletons tend to have higher species richness.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Opposing effects of plant traits on diversification.iScience · 2023Review
- Systematics and Phylogenetic Interrelationships of the Enigmatic Late Jurassic SharkDiversity · 2023Article
- Geographical and life-history traits associated with low and high species richness across angiosperm families.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Macroevolution in axial morphospace: innovations accompanying the transition to marine environments in elapid snakes.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The enigmatic tropical alpine flora on the African sky islands is young, disturbed, and unsaturated.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Diversification Rate is Associated with Rate of Molecular Evolution in Ray-Finned Fish (Actinopterygii).Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
- Rapid increase in snake dietary diversity and complexity following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Telomeric DNA sequences in beetle taxa vary with species richness.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Machine learning approaches identify male body size as the most accurate predictor of species richness.BMC biology · 2020Article
- Molecular inferences about the genus Hypostomus Lacépède, 1803 (Siluriformes: Loricariidae): a review.Molecular biology reports · 2020Review
- Macroevolutionary Analyses Suggest That Environmental Factors, Not Venom Apparatus, Play Key Role in Terebridae Marine Snail Diversification.Systematic biology · 2020Article
- Temporal patterns of diversification in Brassicaceae demonstrate decoupling of rate shifts and mesopolyploidization events.Annals of botany · 2020Article
- Slowly but surely: gradual diversification and phenotypic evolution in the hyper-diverse tree fern family Cyatheaceae.Annals of botany · 2020Article
- The paradox behind the pattern of rapid adaptive radiation: how can the speciation process sustain itself through an early burst?Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2019Article
- Review
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Explaining the dramatic variation in species richness across the tree of life remains a key challenge in evolutionary biology. At the largest phylogenetic scales, the extreme heterogeneity in species richness observed among different groups of organisms is almost certainly a function of many complex and interdependent factors. However, the most fundamental expectation in macroevolutionary studies is simply that species richness in extant clades should be correlated with clade age: all things being equal, older clades will have had more time for diversity to accumulate than younger clades. Here, we test the relationship between stem clade age and species richness across 1,397 major clades of multicellular eukaryotes that collectively account for more than 1.2 million described species. We find no evidence that clade age predicts species richness at this scale. We demonstrate that this decoupling of age and richness is unlikely to result from variation in net diversification rates among clades. At the largest phylogenetic scales, contemporary patterns of species richness are inconsistent with unbounded diversity increase through time. These results imply that a fundamentally different interpretative paradigm may be needed in the study of phylogenetic diversity patterns in many groups of organisms.
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