ArticleScience advances2020
Anthropogenic extinctions conceal widespread evolution of flightlessness in birds.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The importance of migratory drop-off for island colonization in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Pooled it
- Global patterns and drivers of extinction risk in island endemic terrestrial vertebrates.Science advances · 2026Article
- A transition toward flightlessness in Mallards, Indian Runner Ducks, and their hybrid offspring.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Review
- Comparative Biologists and Aerospace Engineers: Important Allies to Explore the Secrets of Natural Flight.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Comparative Anatomy Supports the Evolution of Nocturnality in the Extinct Hawaiian Ibis Apteribis.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Species introductions shift seed dispersal potential more than extinctions across 120 island plant-frugivore communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A synthesis of terrestrial species extinctions in the Macaronesian Islands and their correspondence with human occupancy.PNAS nexus · 2025Review
- Can Macroevolution Inform Contemporary Extinction Risk?Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Global spatiotemporal patterns of demographic fluctuations in terrestrial vertebrates during the Late Pleistocene.Science advances · 2025Article
- Conservation priorities for functionally unique and specialized terrestrial vertebrates threatened by biological invasions.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Structure and function of the avian respiratory system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- What passes through the extinction filter? Historical and contemporary patterns of vulnerability of the most extinction-prone bird family (Aves: Rallidae).Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Article
- Undiscovered bird extinctions obscure the true magnitude of human-driven extinction waves.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Novel plant-frugivore network on Mauritius is unlikely to compensate for the extinction of seed dispersers.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The evolution of insular woodiness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ranking threats to biodiversity and why it doesn't matter.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Small brains predisposed Late Quaternary mammals to extinction.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Loss of functional diversity through anthropogenic extinctions of island birds is not offset by biotic invasions.Science advances · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human-driven extinctions can affect our understanding of evolution, through the nonrandom loss of certain types of species. Here, we explore how knowledge of a major evolutionary transition-the evolution of flightlessness in birds-is biased by anthropogenic extinctions. Adding data on 581 known anthropogenic extinctions to the extant global avifauna increases the number of species by 5%, but quadruples the number of flightless species. The evolution of flightlessness in birds is a widespread phenomenon, occurring in more than half of bird orders and evolving independently at least 150 times. Thus, we estimate that this evolutionary transition occurred at a rate four times higher than it would appear based solely on extant species. Our analysis of preanthropogenic avian diversity shows how anthropogenic effects can conceal the frequency of major evolutionary transitions in life forms and highlights the fact that macroevolutionary studies with only small amounts of missing data can still be highly biased.
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Registered trials
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