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Ferns diversified in the shadow of angiosperms.

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Date
2004-04
Authors
Schneider, Harald
Schuettpelz, Eric
Pryer, Kathleen M
Cranfill, Raymond
Magallón, Susana
Lupia, Richard
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Abstract
The rise of angiosperms during the Cretaceous period is often portrayed as coincident with a dramatic drop in the diversity and abundance of many seed-free vascular plant lineages, including ferns. This has led to the widespread belief that ferns, once a principal component of terrestrial ecosystems, succumbed to the ecological predominance of angiosperms and are mostly evolutionary holdovers from the late Palaeozoic/early Mesozoic era. The first appearance of many modern fern genera in the early Tertiary fossil record implies another evolutionary scenario; that is, that the majority of living ferns resulted from a more recent diversification. But a full understanding of trends in fern diversification and evolution using only palaeobotanical evidence is hindered by the poor taxonomic resolution of the fern fossil record in the Cretaceous. Here we report divergence time estimates for ferns and angiosperms based on molecular data, with constraints from a reassessment of the fossil record. We show that polypod ferns (> 80% of living fern species) diversified in the Cretaceous, after angiosperms, suggesting perhaps an ecological opportunistic response to the diversification of angiosperms, as angiosperms came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems.
Type
Journal article
Subject
Angiosperms
Ferns
Biodiversity
Evolution, Molecular
Phylogeny
Time Factors
Fossils
Molecular Sequence Data
Biological Evolution
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21860
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/nature02361
Publication Info
Schneider, Harald; Schuettpelz, Eric; Pryer, Kathleen M; Cranfill, Raymond; Magallón, Susana; & Lupia, Richard (2004). Ferns diversified in the shadow of angiosperms. Nature, 428(6982). pp. 553-557. 10.1038/nature02361. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21860.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Scholars@Duke

Pryer

Kathleen M. Pryer

Professor of Biology
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