Angiosperms are by far the most species-rich clade of land plants, but their origin and early evolutionary history remain poorly understood. We reconstructed angiosperm phylogeny based on 80 genes from 2,881 plastid genomes representing 85% of extant families and all orders. With a well-resolved plastid tree and 62 fossil calibrations, we dated the origin of the crown angiosperms to the Upper Triassic, with major angiosperm radiations occurring in the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous. This estimated...

We investigated whether cross-cultural food plant selection in southern Africa is best explained by language ancestry, floristic environment or subsistence strategy. Location: The flora of southern Africa region. Taxa: All 1740 edible plant taxa of southern Africa, representing 711 genera in 156 families. Methods: Distribution data of plants were overlapped in ArcMap with 19 language maps, eight biomes and all taxa with nutritional data. Six correlations were estimated between five pair-wise distance matrices (language ancestry,...

Intraspecific genetic structure in widely distributed marine species often mirrors the boundaries between temperature-defined bioregions. This suggests that the same thermal gradients that maintain distinct species assemblages also drive the evolution of new biodiversity. Ecological speciation scenarios are often invoked to explain such patterns, but the fact that adaptation is usually only identified when phylogenetic splits are already evident makes it impossible to rule out the alternative scenario of allopatric speciation with subsequent adaptation. We...