ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Macroevolutionary diversification rates show time dependency.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmental and Evolutionary Correlates of Extinction Risk in a Global Biodiversity Hotspot.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Identifying biotic and abiotic roles in marine clade extinction.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Synnovation and confluence explain disparities in species richness across the Andes and Hengduan-Himalaya Mountains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Niche evolution and asymmetric diversification in elm species (Ulmaceae).Plant diversity · 2026Article
- The nature and prevalence of diversification rate shifts across the Tree of Life.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Parameter Estimation from Phylogenetic Trees Using Neural Networks and Ensemble Learning.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Diversification patterns of the southwest Australian biodiversity hotspot reveal a novel macroevolutionary pathway to plant hyperdiversity.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Integrating genome-wide traits and multi-loci phylogeny to investigate orchid evolution-A case study on Pleurothallidinae.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2025Article
- The latitudinal variation in amphibian speciation rates revisited.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Climate-driven environmental filtering determines hump-shaped elevational pattern of seed plant beta diversity in the central Himalayas.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Article
- Skull evolution and lineage diversification in endemic Malagasy carnivorans.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Noise leads to the perceived increase in evolutionary rates over short time scales.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Evolutionary déjà vu? A case of convergent evolution in an ant-plant association.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Commonly used Bayesian diversification methods lead to biologically meaningful differences in branch-specific rates on empirical phylogenies.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- The causes of species richness patterns among clades.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Completing a molecular timetree of primates.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Applying phylogenetic methods for species delimitation to distinguish B-cell clonal families.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Time-calibrated phylogeny of neotropical freshwater fishes.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2024Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
For centuries, biologists have been captivated by the vast disparity in species richness between different groups of organisms. Variation in diversity is widely attributed to differences between groups in how fast they speciate or go extinct. Such macroevolutionary rates have been estimated for thousands of groups and have been correlated with an incredible variety of organismal traits. Here we analyze a large collection of phylogenetic trees and fossil time series and describe a hidden generality among these seemingly idiosyncratic results: speciation and extinction rates follow a scaling law in which both depend on the age of the group in which they are measured, with the fastest rates in the youngest clades. Using a series of simulations and sensitivity analyses, we demonstrate that the time dependency is unlikely to be a result of simple statistical artifacts. As such, this time scaling is likely a genuine feature of the tree of life, hinting that the dynamics of biodiversity over deep time may be driven in part by surprisingly simple and general principles.
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