Journal article
Fossil evidence for a hyperdiverse sclerophyll flora under a non-Mediterranean-type climate
JMK Sniderman, GJ Jordan, RM Cowling
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | Published : 2013
Abstract
The spectacular diversity of sclerophyll plants in the Cape Floristic Region in South Africa and Australia's Southwest Floristic Region has been attributed to either explosive radiation on infertile soils under fire-prone, summer-dry climates or sustained accretion of species under inferred stable climate regimes. However, the very poor fossil record of these regions has made these ideas difficult to test. Here, we reconstruct ecological-scale plant species richness from an exceptionally well-preserved fossil flora. We show that a hyperdiverse sclerophyll flora existed under high-rainfall, summerwet climates in the Early Pleistocene in southeastern Australia. The sclerophyll flora of this re..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the Center for Nanoscale Systems (Harvard University), particularly Richard Schalek; the Central Science Laboratory (University of Tasmania), particularly Karsten Goemann; Kate Bromfield and Liam Mulcahy for some of the scanning EM; Josephine Brown for help with Fig. 1; and Malte Meinshausen for help with Monte Carlo simulations. For discussions and comments on the manuscript, we thank Malte Meinshausen, Matt McGlone, and Peter Wilf. This work was partly supported by a Bullard Fellowship (Harvard University) and Australian Research Council Grants DE120102530 (to J.M.K.S.), DP110104926 (to G.J.J.), and DP0878342 (to G.J.J.).