Charles C Davis

..Two recent studies find that recent pulses of extinction and speciation have shaped today's gymnosperm diversity, contradicting the widespread assumption that gymnosperms have remained largely unchanged for tens of millions of years...

..This Laurasian migration route may explain many other extant lineages that exhibit western Gondwanan distributions...

..These results illustrate the ways in which phylogenetic thinking can aid in making generalizations of practical importance and enhance efforts to predict species' responses to future climate change...

..virginianum, and that the latter may have happened very rapidly. This is the first report of HGT from an angiosperm to a fern, through either direct parasitism or the mediation of interconnecting fungal symbionts...

..Given the inferred phylogeny, we estimate that there was a circa 79-fold increase in flower diameter on the stem lineage of Rafflesiaceae, making this one of the most dramatic cases of size evolution reported for eukaryotes...

..Future phylogenetic tests of these hypotheses should be conducted to determine if the transition to such pollination systems correlates with significant changes in the mode and tempo of blossom size evolution...

..New data now suggest that floral size evolution within Rafflesiaceae may be more dynamic than expected, with both recent and rapid changes in flower size...

..These approaches are likely to help improve phylogenetic resolution in other poorly resolved major clades of angiosperms and to be more broadly useful in studies across the Tree of Life...

..This demonstrates that climate change has likely played, and may continue to play, an important role in facilitating non-native species naturalization and invasion at the community level...

..These results indicate that similar floral phenotypes in this large angiosperm clade have evolved via parallel genetic changes from an otherwise highly conserved developmental program...

....

..We conducted a taxon-rich multigene phylogenetic analysis of the clusioids to clarify phylogenetic relationships in this clade...

..This may represent a more general pattern for other parasitic plant clades and perhaps more broadly for angiosperms...

..Studies of HGT in parasitic plants have relied largely on the fortuitous discovery of gene phylogenies that indicate HGT, and no broad systematic search for HGT has been undertaken in parasitic systems where it is most expected to occur...

..We consider three evolutionary models that may have given rise to this patterning, including the hypothesis that floral zygomorphy in Malpighiaceae arose earlier than standard morphology-based character reconstructions suggest...

....

..This case illustrates that dated phylogenies can provide an important new source of evidence bearing on the timing of major environmental changes, which may be especially useful when fossil evidence is limited or controversial...

..These discordant phylogenetic hypotheses strongly suggest that part of the mitochondrial genome in Rafflesiaceae was acquired via HGT from their hosts...

..Although the spread of xeric environments resulted in the extinction of many African plant groups, our data suggest that for others it provided an opportunity for further diversification...

..In particular, it is shown here that densely sampled taxon trees built with multiple genes provide an indispensable test of taxon-sparse trees inferred from genome sequences...