Daniel L. Rabosky

TL;DR: Molecular phylogenetic analysis, calibrated with fossils, resolves the time frame of the mammalian radiation and diversification analyses suggest important roles for the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution and KPg mass extinction in opening up ecospace that promoted interordinal and intraordinal diversification, respectively.

TL;DR: A method that can identify arbitrary numbers of time-varying diversification processes on phylogenies without specifying their locations in advance is developed and will greatly facilitate the exploration of macroevolutionary dynamics across large phylogenetic trees, which may have been shaped by heterogeneous mixtures of distinct evolutionary processes.

TL;DR: Living vertebrate biodiversity is revealed to be the product of volatile turnover punctuated by 6 accelerations responsible for >85% of all species as well as 3 slowdowns that have produced “living fossils.”

TL;DR: BAMMtools enables users to extract credible sets of diversification shifts and to identify diversification histories with the maximum a posteriori probability, and will facilitate inference on the complex mixture of processes that have shaped the distribution of species and phenotypes across the tree of life.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that rates of species diversification are highly correlated with the rate of body size evolution across the 30,000+ living species of ray-finned fishes that comprise the majority of vertebrate biological diversity.