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Livistona palms in Australia: Ancient relics or opportunistic immigrants?
- Source :
- Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 54:512-523
- Publication Year :
- 2010
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2010.
-
Abstract
- Eighteen of the 34 species of the fan palm genus Livistona (Arecaceae) are restricted to Australia and southern New Guinea, east of Wallace’s Line, an ancient biogeographic boundary between the former supercontinents Laurasia and Gondwana. The remaining species extend from SE Asia to Africa, west of Wallace’s Line. Competing hypotheses contend that Livistona is (a) ancient, its current distribution a relict of the supercontinents, or (b) a Miocene immigrant from the north into Australia as it drifted towards Asia. We have tested these hypotheses using Bayesian and penalized likelihood molecular dating based on 4 Kb of nuclear and chloroplast DNA sequences with multiple fossil calibration points. Ancestral areas and biomes were reconstructed using parsimony and maximum likelihood. We found strong support for the second hypothesis, that a single Livistona ancestor colonized Australia from the north about 10–17 Ma. Spread and diversification of the genus within Australia was likely favoured by a transition from the aseasonal wet to monsoonal biome, to which it could have been preadapted by fire-tolerance.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
DNA, Plant
Biogeography
Biome
Arecaceae
Biology
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Evolution, Molecular
03 medical and health sciences
Paleontology
Genus
Genetics
Vicariance
Molecular Biology
Ecosystem
Phylogeny
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
030304 developmental biology
Livistona
Cell Nucleus
Likelihood Functions
0303 health sciences
Geography
Fossils
Ecology
Australia
DNA, Chloroplast
Bayes Theorem
Sequence Analysis, DNA
15. Life on land
biology.organism_classification
Gondwana
Haplotypes
Laurasia
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 10557903
- Volume :
- 54
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....18797a4270154cbccea3249072b6437a