ArticleNature communications2023
Bird clades with less complex appendicular skeletons tend to have higher species richness.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Assessing the completeness and consistency of global-scale avian datasets.Scientific reports · 2025Review
- Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate 'complexity space'.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Evolution, Complexity, and Life History Theory.Biological theory · 2025Article
- Toward a Comprehensive Anatomical Matrix for Crown Birds: Phylogenetic Insights from the Pectoral Girdle and Forelimb Skeleton.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Evolution of avian foot morphology through anatomical network analysis.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Species richness is strikingly uneven across taxonomic groups at all hierarchical levels, but the reasons for this heterogeneity are poorly understood. It is well established that morphological diversity (disparity) is decoupled from taxonomic diversity, both between clades and across geological time. Morphological complexity has been much less studied, but there is theory linking complexity with differential diversity across groups. Here we devise an index of complexity from the differentiation of the fore and hind limb pairs for a sample of 983 species of extant birds. We test the null hypothesis that this index of morphological complexity is uncorrelated with clade diversity, revealing a significant and negative correlation between the species richness of clades and the mean morphological complexity of those clades. Further, we find that more complex clades tend to occupy a smaller number of dietary and habitat niches, and that this proxy for greater ecological specialisation correlates with lower species richness. Greater morphological complexity in the appendicular skeleton therefore appears to hinder the generation and maintenance of species diversity. This may result from entrenchment into morphologies and ecologies that are less capable of yielding further diversity.
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.