Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Davis M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6217385 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis.
Davis Matt M Faurby Søren S Svenning Jens-Christian JC
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20181015 44
The incipient sixth mass extinction that started in the Late Pleistocene has already erased over 300 mammal species and, with them, more than 2.5 billion y of unique evolutionary history. At the global scale, this lost phylogenetic diversity (PD) can only be restored with time as lineages evolve and create new evolutionary history. Given the increasing rate of extinctions however, can mammals evolve fast enough to recover their lost PD on a human time scale? We use a birth-death tree framework t ...[more]
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