High number of extinct bird species leads to misinterpretation of evolutionary dynamics

High number of extinct bird species leads to misinterpretation of evolutionary dynamics

2020-12-18

A study with the participation of our Bayceer member Prof. Manuel Steinbauer uses paleontological data to show an underestimated anthropogenic influence on evolutionary dynamics and species extinction. Therefore, the research group pleads to base macroevolutionary analyses not only on purely genetic species datasets, but to include paleontological, ecological and evolutionary research datasets.

Abstract:

Human-driven extinctions can affect our understanding of evolution, through the nonrandom loss of certain types of species. Here, we explore how knowledge of a major evolutionary transition—the evolution of flightlessness in birds—is biased by anthropogenic extinctions. Adding data on 581 known anthropogenic extinctions to the extant global avifauna increases the number of species by 5%, but quadruples the number of flightless species. The evolution of flightlessness in birds is a widespread phenomenon, occurring in more than half of bird orders and evolving independently at least 150 times. Thus, we estimate that this evolutionary transition occurred at a rate four times higher than it would appear based solely on extant species. Our analysis of preanthropogenic avian diversity shows how anthropogenic effects can conceal the frequency of major evolutionary transitions in life forms and highlights the fact that macroevolutionary studies with only small amounts of missing data can still be highly biased.

Further details and figures are found in the publication of Sayol et al. (2020) „Anthropogenic extinctions conceal widespread evolution of flightlessness in birds“ in Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb6095).

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