Studying species interactions in nature often requires elaborate logistics and intense fieldwork. The difficulties in such task might hinder our ability to answer questions on how biotic interactions change with the environment. Fortunately, a workaround to this problem lies within scientific collections. For some animals, the inspection of preserved specimens can reveal the scars of past antagonistic encounters, such as predation attempts. A common defensive behaviour that leaves scars on animals is autotomy, the loss...

Aim: Inverse latitudinal diversity gradients (i-LDG), whereby regional richness peaks outside the tropics, have rarely been investigated and their causes remain unclear. Here, we investigate three prominent explanations, postulating that species-rich regions have had (1) longer time to accumulate species, (2) faster diversification, and (3) more energy to support more diverse communities. These mechanisms have been shown to explain the tropical megadiversity, and we examine whether they can also explain i-LDG. Location: Global Time period:...

Investigations of phenotypic disparity across geography often ignore macroevolutionary processes. As a corollary, the random null expectations to which disparity is compared and interpreted may be unrealistic. We tackle this issue by representing, in geographical space, distinct processes of phenotypic evolution underlying ecological disparity. Under divergent natural selection, assemblages in a given region should have empirical disparity higher than expected under an evolutionarily-oriented null model, while the opposite may indicate constraints on phenotypic evolution. We...