Estimating rates of speciation and extinction, and understanding how and why they vary
over evolutionary time, geographical space and species groups, is a key to understanding …

The foundations of several disciplines can be expressed as simple quantitative laws, for
example, Newton's laws or the laws of thermodynamics. Here I present five laws derived …

Time-calibrated phylogenies of extant species (referred to here as 'extant timetrees') are
widely used for estimating diversification dynamics. However, there has been considerable …

Far more species of organisms are found in the tropics than in temperate and polar regions,
but the evolutionary and ecological causes of this pattern remain controversial 1, 2. Tropical …

paleotree is a library of functions for the R statistical computing environment dedicated to
analyses that combine paleontological and phylogenetic data sets, particularly the time …

Snakes of the cosmopolitan family Viperidae comprise around 329 venomous species
showing a striking heterogeneity in species richness among lineages. While the subfamily …

Explaining variation in species richness among provinces and other large geographic
regions remains one of the most challenging problems at the intersection of ecology and …

Comparative biologists often attempt to draw inferences about tempo and mode in evolution
by comparing the fit of evolutionary models to phylogenetic comparative data consisting of a …

Historical patterns of species diversity inferred from phylogenies typically contradict the
direct evidence found in the fossil record. According to the fossil record, species frequently …

The branching times of molecular phylogenies allow us to infer speciation and extinction
dynamics even when fossils are absent. Troublingly, phylogenetic approaches usually …