Although the Sahara is a major geographical feature of the African continent, its role in the diversification of animal species is not well understood. We present here a molecular phylogeny for members of the endemic African mammalian order Macroscelidea (elephant shrews) with molecular-clock calculations; this molecular phylogeny provides convincing evidence that the genus Elephantulus is diph...

Parallel evolution is the independent appearance of similar derived phenotypes from similar ancestral forms. It is of key importance in the debate over whether evolution is stochastic and unpredictable, or subject to constraints that limit available phenotypic options. Nevertheless, its occurrence has rarely been demonstrated above the species level. Climate change on the Australian landmass ov...

The report released by the Intergovernmental Committee for Climate Change indicates that Romania ranks among the top seven countries in Europe that would be strongly impacted by aridity in the next few years, with climate changes consisting in a rise of average annual temperatures by as much as 5°C. The research work was conducted in the South of the Oltenia South-Western Development Region, wh...

The painted turtle, Chrysemys picta, is currently recognized as a continentally distributed polytypic species, ranging across North America from southern Canada to extreme northern Mexico. We analyzed variation in the rapidly evolving mitochondrial control region (CR) in 241 turtles from 117 localities across this range to examine whether the painted turtle represents a continentally distribute...

Palaeogene environmental evolution in East Asia remains ambiguous. Here we present integrative work including magnetostratigraphy, grain-size, geochemistry, and clay mineralalogy from a 1609 m-thick fluviolacustrine sequence eastern China. The results reveal two periods of tectonic control alternating with three climatic on the sedimentary evolution. Tectonic activity study area, as revealed by...

Wetland ecosystems in water-limited environments locally boost biotic interactions, habitat diversity, and species concentrations, but little knowledge exists on their long-term functioning susceptibility to regime shifts that might influence conservation reclamation actions. Here we used a historical ecology approach rare Mediterranean peat-bog reconstruct ecological successions for the last 4...

Abstract The Miocene–Holocene dust sequences composing the Chinese Loess Plateau are one of Earth’s most complete terrestrial eolian sediment archives. Here we present a zircon Uranium-Lead geochronology dataset for sequence from northeastern plateau and compare results with those central plateau. These data show trend increasing spatial provenance contrast late Miocene to Pleistocene. This can...

Climate change is often assumed to be a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, it can also set the stage for novel diversification in lineages with the evolutionary ability to colonize new environments. Here we tested if the extraordinary evolutionary success of the genus Pelargonium was related to the ability of its species to capitalize on the climate niche variation produced by the hist...