John J. Schenk

TL;DR: It is proposed that ecological opportunity could promote adaptive radiation by generating specific changes to the selective regimes acting on natural populations, both by relaxing effective stabilizing selection and by creating conditions that ultimately generate diversifying selection.

TL;DR: The results provide a phylogenetic framework for comparative studies that is not highly dependent upon the signal from any one gene and compared the results of multigene supermatrix studies like this one with the principal published supertrees and concluded that the latter are unreliable for any comparative study in muroids.

TL;DR: An extension of the conventional ecological opportunity model to include a geographic incumbency effect is presented, the largest muroid phylogeny to date is developed, and a pattern of incumbency that is consistent with ecological opportunity is seen, but they did not inhibit initial diversification rates of secondary colonizers.

TL;DR: Primary calibrations lead to a false impression of precision and the distribution of age estimates shift away from those that would be inferred by the primary analysis, suggesting that secondary calibrations should not be applied as the only source of calibration in divergence time analyses that test time-dependent hypotheses until the additional error associated with secondary calibration is more properly modeled.

TL;DR: Simulations demonstrated that use of underparameterized models affected age estimates more than use of overparameterization models, and increasing the number of calibration points can limit but not completely remove discrepancies introduced by underparametersized models.