Simões Tiago R, Kammerer Christian F, Caldwell Michael W, Pierce Stephanie E
Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, 11 W. Jones Street, Raleigh, NC 27601, USA.
Sci Adv. 2022 Aug 19;8(33):eabq1898. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq1898.
Climate change-induced mass extinctions provide unique opportunities to explore the impacts of global environmental disturbances on organismal evolution. However, their influence on terrestrial ecosystems remains poorly understood. Here, we provide a new time tree for the early evolution of reptiles and their closest relatives to reconstruct how the Permian-Triassic climatic crises shaped their long-term evolutionary trajectory. By combining rates of phenotypic evolution, mode of selection, body size, and global temperature data, we reveal an intimate association between reptile evolutionary dynamics and climate change in the deep past. We show that the origin and phenotypic radiation of reptiles was not solely driven by ecological opportunity following the end-Permian extinction as previously thought but also the result of multiple adaptive responses to climatic shifts spanning 57 million years.
气候变化引发的大规模灭绝为探索全球环境干扰对生物进化的影响提供了独特的机会。然而，它们对陆地生态系统的影响仍知之甚少。在这里，我们为爬行动物及其近亲的早期进化提供了一棵新的时间树，以重建二叠纪-三叠纪气候危机如何塑造它们的长期进化轨迹。通过结合表型进化速率、选择模式、体型和全球温度数据，我们揭示了远古时期爬行动物进化动态与气候变化之间的密切联系。我们表明，爬行动物的起源和表型辐射并非如之前所认为的那样仅仅是二叠纪末灭绝后生态机会的驱动结果，而是对跨越5700万年气候变化的多种适应性反应的结果。
