Imperial College London
Alternate

DrMarkSutton

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Reader in Palaeontology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7487m.sutton

 
 
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Location

 

G.25Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Bennett:2019:10.1098/rstb.2019.0210,
author = {Bennett, D and Sutton, M and Turvey, S},
doi = {10.1098/rstb.2019.0210},
journal = {Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences},
title = {How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0210},
volume = {374},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - How does past evolutionary performance impact future evolutionary performance? This is an important question not just for macroevolutionary biologists who wish to chart the phenomena that describe deep-time changes in biodiversity but also for conservation biologists, as evolutionarily distinct species – which may be deemed “low-performing” in our current era – are increasingly the focus of conservation efforts. Contrasting hypotheses exist to account for the history and future of evolutionarily distinct species: on the one hand they may be relicts of large radiations, potentially “doomed” to extinction; or they may be slow-evolving, “living fossils”, likely neither to speciate nor go extinct; or they may be seeds of future radiations. Here we attempt to test these hypotheses in Mammalia by combining a molecular phylogenetic supertree with fossil record occurrences and measuring change in evolutionary distinctness (ED) at different time slices. With these time slices, we modelled future ED as a function of past ED. We find that past evolutionary performance does indeed have an impact on future evolutionary performance: the most evolutionarily isolated clades tend to become more evolutionarily distinct with time, indicating that low-performing clades tend to remain low-performing throughout their evolutionary history.
AU  - Bennett,D
AU  - Sutton,M
AU  - Turvey,S
DO  - 10.1098/rstb.2019.0210
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 0962-8436
TI  - How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time
T2  - Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0210
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/72765
VL  - 374
ER  -
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