Paleontology for conservation: Human activities are leading to broad species and system declines. Prevention of such declines has led us to focus on either protection for species or protection for ecosystem function. Looking at past patterns of species and system change can help to inform our understanding of the long-term impacts of these strategies. Blanco et al. studied mammals from the last 21 million years on the Iberian Peninsula, finding long periods of functional stasis, even in the face of taxonomic variability (see the Perspective by Roopnarine and Banker). Functional ecosystems were more resistant to ecosystem collapse. Science , this issue p. 300 ; see also p. 237

El Gran Intercambio Biótico Americano: una revisión paleoambiental de evidencias aportadas por mamíferos y aves neotropicales

Species living in distinct habitats often experience unique ecological selective pressures, which can drive phenotypic divergence. However, how ecophenotypic patterns are affected by allometric trends and trait integration levels is less well understood. Here we evaluate the role of allometry in shaping body size and body form diversity in Pristurus geckos utilizing differing habitats. We found that patterns of allometry and integration in body form were distinct in species with different habitat preferences, with ground-dwelling Pristurus displaying the most divergent allometric trend and high levels of integration. There was also strong concordance between intraspecific allometry across individuals and evolutionary allometry among species, revealing that differences in body form among individuals were predictive of evolutionary changes across the phylogeny at macroevolutionary scales. This suggested that phenotypic evolution occurred along allometric lines of least resistance, with allometric trajectories imposing a strong influence on the magnitude and direction of size and shape changes across the phylogeny. When viewed in phylomorphospace, the largest rock-dwelling species were most similar to the smallest ground-dwelling species, and vice versa. Thus, in Pristurus, phenotypic evolution along the differing habitat-based allometric trajectories resulted in similar body forms at differing body sizes in distinct ecological habitats.

The resource‐use hypothesis, proposed by E.S. Vrba, states that habitat fragmentation caused by climatic oscillations would affect particularly biome specialists (species inhabiting only one biome), which might show higher speciation and extinction rates than biome generalists. If true, lineages would accumulate biome‐specialist species. This effect would be particularly exacerbated for biomes located at the periphery of the global climatic conditions, namely, biomes that have high/low precipitation and high/low temperature such as rainforest (warm‐humid), desert (warm‐dry), steppe (cold‐dry) and tundra (cold‐humid). Here, we test these hypotheses in swallowtail butterflies, a clade with more than 570 species, covering all the continents but Antarctica, and all climatic conditions. Swallowtail butterflies are among the most studied insects, and they are a model group for evolutionary biology and ecology studies. Continental macroecological rules are normally tested using vertebrates, this means that there are fewer examples exploring terrestrial invertebrate patterns at global scale. Here, we compiled a large Geographic Information System database on swallowtail butterflies' distribution maps and used the most complete time‐calibrated phylogeny to quantify diversification rates (DRs). In this paper, we aim to answer the following questions: (1) Are there more biome‐specialist swallowtail butterflies than biome generalists? (2) Is DR related to biome specialization? (3) If so, do swallowtail butterflies inhabiting extreme biomes show higher DRs? (4) What is the effect of species distribution area? Our results showed that swallowtail family presents a great number of biome specialists which showed substantially higher DRs compared to generalists. We also found that biome specialists are unevenly distributed across biomes. Overall, our results are consistent with the resource‐use hypothesis, species climatic niche and biome fragmentation as key factors promoting isolation.