Ferns diversified in the shadow of angiosperms.
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 articleSubject
AngiospermsFerns
Biodiversity
Evolution, Molecular
Phylogeny
Time Factors
Fossils
Molecular Sequence Data
Biological Evolution
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21860Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/nature02361Publication 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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Kathleen M. Pryer
Professor of Biology

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