Abstract:
A central objective of historical biogeography is to understand where clades originated and how they moved across space and over time. However, given the dynamic history of ecosystem changes in response to climate change and geological events, the manifold long-distance dispersals over evolutionary timescales, and regional and global extinctions, it remains uncertain how reliable inferences based solely on extant taxa can be achieved. Using a novel species-level phylogeny of all known extant and extinct species of the mammalian order Carnivora and related extinct groups, we show that far more precise and accurate ancestral areas can be estimated by fully integrating extinct species into the analyses, rather than solely relying on extant species or identifying ancestral areas only based on the geography of the oldest fossils. Through a series of simulations, we further show that this conclusion is robust under realistic scenarios in which the unknown extinct taxa represent a biased subset of all extinct species. Our results highlight the importance of integrating fossil taxa into a phylogenetic framework to further improve our understanding of historical biogeography and reveal the dynamic dispersal and diversification history of carnivores.
摘要:
历史生物地理学的中心目标是了解进化枝的起源以及它们如何在空间和时间上移动。然而,鉴于生态系统响应气候变化和地质事件的动态历史,进化时间尺度上的多种长距离扩散,以及区域和全球灭绝,尚不确定如何实现仅基于现有分类群的可靠推论。使用哺乳动物食肉目和相关灭绝类群的所有已知现存和灭绝物种的新物种级系统发育,我们表明,通过将灭绝的物种充分纳入分析,可以估计更精确和准确的祖先区域,而不是仅仅依靠现存的物种,或者仅仅根据最古老的化石的地理来确定祖先地区。通过一系列的模拟,我们进一步表明,在现实情景下,这个结论是稳健的,在这些情景中,未知的灭绝类群代表了所有灭绝物种的一个有偏差的子集。我们的结果强调了将化石类群整合到系统发育框架中的重要性,以进一步提高我们对历史生物地理学的理解,并揭示食肉动物的动态扩散和多样化历史。