Last week I attended the 8th Biennial conference of the International Biogeography Society in Tucson, Arizona (U.S.A.). The conference included symposia on modelling large scale ecological and evolutionary dynamics, experimental macroecology and building up biogeography from process to pattern. I presented the first results of my work on what may happen to megafaunal-fruited palm lineages under rapid global environmental change. These species with anachronistic fruits (> 4 cm in length) suffer from dispersal limitation because of recent extinctions of their large-bodied (megafauna) fruit and seed dispersers, such as gomphotheres, ground sloths and glyptodonts. However, we do not know how these palms have survived and evolved in the past – and whether they have suffered from extinction previously, during Quaternary climate change for example. In this talk I showed how over the last 2.6 million years (the Quaternary) these megafaunal-fruited palm lineages have experienced increasing extinction rates, but only in the Americas, and how they have evolved smaller fruits in Southeast Asia and Australasia. These smaller fruits may be adaptations to bird-dispersal in these dynamic island systems.
Onstein is ON 