Bird species central to seed-dispersal networks have stable evolutionary lineages

[PhysOrg]

A team of researchers at Universidade de São Paulo has found that bird species that have a central position in frugivory networks tend to belong to more stable lineages over macroevolutionary time scales. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their analysis of hundreds of bird species and their dispersal networks and what they found. Carolina Bello and Elisa Barreto with the Federal Research Institute WSL have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining past studies of complex networks of fruit-eating birds and the seeds they disperse from an evolutionary perspective and the work done by the team in Brazil.

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