How Competition and Climate Forged the Carnivore Family Tree
A macroevolutionary study of Carnivora over 45 million years reveals how biotic and abiotic forces jointly shaped biodiversity. Using a Bayesian framework on fossil data, researchers found that competition between species significantly influenced speciation and extinction regimes across North America and Eurasia. While competition could suppress speciation by saturating niches, it also fostered diversity through mechanisms like character displacement. At regional scales, abiotic factors—specifically cooling temperatures and habitat shifts—acted as selective extinction drivers, disproportionately pruning species from certain regions of the body size traitspace. This integrated analysis demonstrates that the interplay of local-scale competition and broad-scale environmental change is key to understanding long-term diversification patterns and the assembly of modern mammalian faunas.
Why it might matter to you:
This research provides a concrete, data-driven framework for disentangling the drivers of speciation and extinction, a core challenge in evolutionary biology. For professionals focused on macroevolution or phylogenetics, it offers a methodological model for integrating spatial and temporal data to test hypotheses about selective pressures. The findings underscore that predictive models of biodiversity response to modern environmental change must account for the complex interplay between species interactions and abiotic stressors.
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