The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution and the origins of modern biodiversity

MJ Benton, P Wilf, H Sauquet - New Phytologist, 2022 - Wiley Online Library
Biodiversity today has the unusual property that 85% of plant and animal species live on
land rather than in the sea, and half of these live in tropical rainforests. An explosive boost to …

What have we learned from the first 500 avian genomes?

GA Bravo, CJ Schmitt… - Annual Review of Ecology …, 2021 - annualreviews.org
The increased capacity of DNA sequencing has significantly advanced our understanding of
the phylogeny of birds and the proximate and ultimate mechanisms molding their genomic …

A simple dynamic model explains the diversity of island birds worldwide

L Valente, AB Phillimore, M Melo, BH Warren… - Nature, 2020 - nature.com
Colonization, speciation and extinction are dynamic processes that influence global patterns
of species richness,,,,–. Island biogeography theory predicts that the contribution of these …

What is the age of flowering plants?

H Sauquet, S Ramírez-Barahona, S Magallón - 2022 - academic.oup.com
The origin of flowering plants (angiosperms) was one of the most transformative events in
the history of our planet. Despite considerable interest from multiple research fields …

Late Cretaceous neornithine from Europe illuminates the origins of crown birds

DJ Field, J Benito, A Chen, JWM Jagt, DT Ksepka - Nature, 2020 - nature.com
Our understanding of the earliest stages of crown bird evolution is hindered by an
exceedingly sparse avian fossil record from the Mesozoic era. The most ancient …

Data types and the phylogeny of Neoaves

EL Braun, RT Kimball - Birds, 2021 - mdpi.com
Simple Summary Some of the earliest studies using molecular data to resolve evolutionary
history separated birds into three main groups: Paleognathae (ostriches and allies) …

Two notorious nodes: a critical examination of relaxed molecular clock age estimates of the bilaterian animals and placental mammals

GE Budd, RP Mann - Systematic biology, 2024 - academic.oup.com
The popularity of relaxed clock Bayesian inference of clade origin timings has generated
several recent publications with focal results considerably older than the fossils of the clades …

Environmental signal in the evolutionary diversification of bird skeletons

G Navalón, A Bjarnason, E Griffiths, RBJ Benson - Nature, 2022 - nature.com
Characterizing how variation in the tempo and mode of evolution has structured the
phenotypic diversity of extant species is a central goal of macroevolution,–. However …

Genome and life-history evolution link bird diversification to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction

JS Berv, S Singhal, DJ Field, N Walker-Hale… - Science …, 2024 - science.org
Complex patterns of genome evolution associated with the end-Cretaceous [Cretaceous-
Paleogene (K–Pg)] mass extinction limit our understanding of the early evolutionary history …

Phylogenomic analyses of echinoid diversification prompt a re-evaluation of their fossil record

NM Koch, JR Thompson, AS Hiley, MF McCowin… - Elife, 2022 - elifesciences.org
Echinoids are key components of modern marine ecosystems. Despite a remarkable fossil
record, the emergence of their crown group is documented by few specimens of unclear …