ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Quantifying the effects of the break up of Pangaea on global terrestrial diversification with neutral theory.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Body Size Evolution in Burying Beetles (Staphylinidae: Silphinae:Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Systematic revision of Paralongidorus (Nematoda: Longidoridae) based on molecular and morphological evidence, with the description of a new species from Spain.Zoological letters · 2026Article
- Age-dependent extinction and the neutral theory of biodiversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Mechanistic neutral models show that sampling biases drive the apparent explosion of early tetrapod diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Ecological constraints coupled with deep-time habitat dynamics predict the latitudinal diversity gradient in reef fishes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Nonequilibrium evolution of volatility in origination and extinction explains fat-tailed fluctuations in Phanerozoic biodiversity.Science advances · 2019Article
- Comparing spatial diversification and meta-population models in the Indo-Australian Archipelago.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Ancient River Inference Explains Exceptional Oriental Freshwater Mussel Radiations.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- The challenges to inferring the regulators of biodiversity in deep time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The historic richness of most taxonomic groups increases substantially over geological time. Explanations for this fall broadly into two categories: bias in the fossil record and elevated net rates of diversification in recent periods. For example, the break up of Pangaea and isolation between continents might have increased net diversification rates. In this study, we investigate the effect on terrestrial diversification rates of the increased isolation between land masses brought about by continental drift. We use ecological neutral theory as a means to study geologically complex scenarios tractably. Our models show the effects of simulated geological events that affect all species equally, without the added complexity of further ecological processes. We find that continental drift leads to an increase in diversity only where isolation between continents leads to additional speciation through vicariance, and where higher taxa with very low global diversity are considered. We conclude that continental drift by itself is not sufficient to account for the increase in terrestrial species richness observed in the fossil record.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.