ArticleScientific reports2016
Progress to extinction: increased specialisation causes the demise of animal clades.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 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
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying biotic and abiotic roles in marine clade extinction.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- The Evolutionary History and Morphological Divergence of Corallivorous Fishes on Coral Reefs.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Derived faunivores are the forerunners of major synapsid radiations.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Speciation rates are unrelated to the formation of population structure in Malagasy gemsnakes.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Dietary niches of creodonts and carnivorans of the late Eocene Cypress Hills Formation.Journal of mammalogy · 2022Article
- The evolution of the traplining pollinator role in hummingbirds: specialization is not an evolutionary dead end.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Iterative evolution of large-bodied hypercarnivory in canids benefits species but not clades.Communications biology · 2020Article
- A 450 million years long latitudinal gradient in age-dependent extinction.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Assessing the utility of conserving evolutionary history.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2019Article
- Article
- Article
- Approaches to Macroevolution: 2. Sorting of Variation, Some Overarching Issues, and General Conclusions.Evolutionary biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animal clades tend to follow a predictable path of waxing and waning during their existence, regardless of their total species richness or geographic coverage. Clades begin small and undifferentiated, then expand to a peak in diversity and range, only to shift into a rarely broken decline towards extinction. While this trajectory is now well documented and broadly recognised, the reasons underlying it remain obscure. In particular, it is unknown why clade extinction is universal and occurs with such surprising regularity. Current explanations for paleontological extinctions call on the growing costs of biological interactions, geological accidents, evolutionary traps, and mass extinctions. While these are effective causes of extinction, they mainly apply to species, not clades. Although mass extinctions is the undeniable cause for the demise of a sizeable number of major taxa, we show here that clades escaping them go extinct because of the widespread tendency of evolution to produce increasingly specialised, sympatric, and geographically restricted species over time.
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.