ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Rates of morphological evolution are heterogeneous in Early Cretaceous birds.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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22 citing papers in PubMed, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
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- A new sphenodontian (Diapsida: Lepidosauria) from the Upper Triassic (Norian) of Germany and its implications for the mode of sphenodontian evolution.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Low morphological disparity and decelerated rate of limb size evolution close to the origin of birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Syngnathoid Evolutionary History and the Conundrum of Fossil Misplacement.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Evolutionary origins of the prolonged extant squamate radiation.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The Jurassic rise of squamates as supported by lepidosaur disparity and evolutionary rates.eLife · 2022Article
- The evolutionary and functional implications of the unusual quadrate of Longipteryx chaoyangensis (Avialae: Enantiornithes) from the Cretaceous Jehol Biota of China.Journal of anatomy · 2021Article
- Deep time diversity and the early radiations of birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The patterns and modes of the evolution of disparity in Mesozoic birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Do key innovations unlock diversification? A case-study on the morphological and ecological impact of pharyngognathy in acanthomorph fishes.Current zoology · 2020Article
- Morphological Phylogenetics Evaluated Using Novel Evolutionary Simulations.Systematic biology · 2020Article
- Megaevolutionary dynamics and the timing of evolutionary innovation in reptiles.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Extinction rates of non-avian dinosaur species are uncorrelated with the rate of evolution of phylogenetically informative characters.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Fossil evidence reveals how plants responded to cooling during the Cretaceous-Paleogene transition.BMC plant biology · 2019Article
- Bayesian tip dating reveals heterogeneous morphological clocks in Mesozoic birds.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- A new Jurassic scansoriopterygid and the loss of membranous wings in theropod dinosaurs.Nature · 2019Article
- Rapid morphological evolution in placental mammals post-dates the origin of the crown group.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- NewPeerJ · 2019Article
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Early Cretaceous is a critical interval in the early history of birds. Exceptional fossils indicate that important evolutionary novelties such as a pygostyle and a keeled sternum had already arisen in Early Cretaceous taxa, bridging much of the morphological gap between Archaeopteryx and crown birds. However, detailed features of basal bird evolution remain obscure because of both the small sample of fossil taxa previously considered and a lack of quantitative studies assessing rates of morphological evolution. Here we apply a recently available phylogenetic method and associated sensitivity tests to a large data matrix of morphological characters to quantify rates of morphological evolution in Early Cretaceous birds. Our results reveal that although rates were highly heterogeneous between different Early Cretaceous avian lineages, consistent patterns of significantly high or low rates were harder to pinpoint. Nevertheless, evidence for accelerated evolutionary rates is strongest at the point when Ornithuromorpha (the clade comprises all extant birds and descendants from their most recent common ancestors) split from Enantiornithes (a diverse clade that went extinct at the end-Cretaceous), consistent with the hypothesis that this key split opened up new niches and ultimately led to greater diversity for these two dominant clades of Mesozoic birds.
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