ArticleCommunications biology2020
Iterative evolution of large-bodied hypercarnivory in canids benefits species but not clades.
Article in Communications biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Adaptive zones of feliforms and evolutionary regimes within terrestrial mammalian carnivores.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- The Evolutionary History and Morphological Divergence of Corallivorous Fishes on Coral Reefs.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Article
- Diving into a dead-end: asymmetric evolution of diving drives diversity and disparity shifts in waterbirds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- SARS-CoV-2: Cross-scale Insights from Ecology and Evolution.Trends in microbiology · 2021Review
- Evolutionary determinism and convergence associated with water-column transitions in marine fishes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Iterative evolution of large-bodied hypercarnivory in canids benefits species but not clades.Communications biology · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Ecological specialization has costs and benefits at various scales: traits benefitting an individual may disadvantage its population, species or clade. In particular, large body size and hypercarnivory (diet over 70% meat) have evolved repeatedly in mammals; yet large hypercarnivores are thought to be trapped in a macroevolutionary "ratchet", marching unilaterally toward decline. Here, we weigh the impact of this specialization on extinction risk using the rich fossil record of North American canids (dogs). In two of three canid subfamilies over the past 40 million years, diversification of large-bodied hypercarnivores appears constrained at the clade level, biasing specialized lineages to extinction. However, despite shorter species durations, extinction rates of large hypercarnivores have been mostly similar to those of all other canids. Extinction was size- and carnivory-selective only at the end of the Pleistocene epoch 11,000 years ago, suggesting that large hypercarnivores were not disadvantaged at the species level before anthropogenic influence.
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