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ABSTRACT Plants and animals are often adorned with potentially conspicuous colours (e.g. red, yellow, orange, blue, purple). These include the dazzling colours of fruits and flowers, the brilliant warning colours of frogs, snakes, and invertebrates, and the spectacular sexually selected colours of insects, fish, birds, and lizards. Such signals are often thought to utilize pre‐existing sensitivities in the receiver's visual systems. This raises the question: what was the initial function of conspicuous colouration and colour vision? Here, we review the origins of colour vision, fruit, flowers, and aposematic and sexually selected colouration. We find that aposematic colouration is widely distributed across animals but relatively young, evolving only in the last ~150 million years (Myr). Sexually selected colouration in animals appears confined to arthropods and chordates, and is also relatively young (generally <100 Myr). Colourful flowers likely evolved ~200 million years ago (Mya), whereas colourful fruits/seeds likely evolved ~300 Mya. Colour vision (sensu lato) appears to be substantially older, and likely originated ~400–500 Mya in both arthropods and chordates. Thus, colour vision may have evolved long before extant lineages with fruit, flowers, aposematism, and sexual colour signals. We also find that there appears to have been an explosion of colour within the last ~100 Myr, including >200 origins of aposematic colouration across nine animal phyla and >100 origins of sexually selected colouration among arthropods and chordates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Diet is a key aspect of life in animals. There have been numerous independent origins of herbivorous diet across animals, but the factors that explain these origins remain poorly understood. One potentially crucial factor is body temperature (Tb), as the gut‐dwelling bacteria that help digest cellulose in many herbivores are thought to require high temperatures. However, analyses in birds, lizards and mammals found only limited evidence for higher Tb in herbivores than in carnivores. These analyses tested whether diet explains Tb evolution. Here, we focus instead on testing whether Tb helps explain the evolution of diet across tetrapods. Location: Global. Time Period: Past 350 million years. Major Taxa Studied: Tetrapods. Methods: We analysed 1712 species with matched data on diet and Tb using diverse phylogenetic methods. Results: Ancestral reconstructions indicated that tetrapods likely had a carnivorous ancestor, followed by repeated transitions to omnivory and herbivory, especially in the last 110 million years. Thus, extant herbivorous lineages in tetrapods are relatively young, in contrast to many older carnivorous lineages. They are also relatively unstable in that reversals from herbivory back to omnivory and from omnivory back to carnivory were as frequent as the origins of herbivory and omnivory. Using phylogenetic logistic regression, we support the hypothesis that higher Tb helps explain the evolution of herbivory across tetrapods and within birds, mammals, lepidosaurs and turtles. Phylogenetic path analyses suggest that Tb generally drives the evolution of herbivory, and not vice versa. Our analyses also suggest that Tb is more important for the evolution of herbivory than large body size or diurnal diel activity, which are both significant predictors of herbivory in some cases. Main Conclusions: Our results show for the first time that Tb is a significant predictor of diet evolution among and within many major animal clades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The climatic niche is associated with diversification in many groups of animals and plants. However, the relationships between climatic‐niche breadth evolution, climatic‐niche position evolution, and speciation remain underexplored. It is particularly unclear whether changes in climatic‐niche breadth are related to diversification. We tested two hypotheses relating niche breadth, niche position, and speciation using climatic data in Squamata (lizards and snakes), one of the largest radiations of tetrapods. These hypotheses were: (1) the oscillation hypothesis (niche breadth changes along with niche position and speciation) and (2) the musical‐chairs hypothesis (niche breadth remains relatively constant when niche position changes during speciation). Location: Global. Taxon: Squamata (lizards and snakes). Methods: We estimated rates of speciation and evolutionary rates for both climatic‐niche position and climatic‐niche breadth for 5320 squamate species. We tested relationships among these rates using Bayesian phylogenetic generalised linear‐mixed models. Results: Higher speciation rates were associated with higher rates of evolution in niche position and in niche breadth. Faster rates of change in niche breadth were related to narrower niches and faster rates of change in niche position. Main Conclusions: Our results support the oscillation hypothesis to explain the relationships between speciation and changes in climatic‐niche position and climatic‐niche breadth. We found that species that changed climatic‐niche breadths more rapidly: (1) speciated faster; (2) evolved towards narrower niche breadths; and (3) changed climatic‐niche positions more rapidly. These results suggest that oscillation between wider and narrower niches is coupled with climatic‐niche divergence and speciation. These conclusions may apply to many other groups of plants and animals in which speciation is often related to climatic‐niche divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among direct-developing rain frogs of the genus Craugastor is a clade of 19 described species (bocourti series) that occur in Mexico and northern Central America. Many of these 19 species have been described based on subtle morphological differences and have never been examined using molecular data. Here, we used a multilocus dataset (one mitochondrial (mtDNA) and four nuclear (nDNA) gene fragments, totalling 3,048 concatenated base pairs) to investigate species limits and phylogenetic relationships among 60 northern rain frogs referable to 12 species, with a focus on species from Guatemala. We inferred phylogenies using maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses on separate mtDNA and nDNA datasets. Concatenated and coalescent species-tree analyses support the monophyly of multiple species, with interspecific relationships mostly unresolved. These mtDNA and nDNA trees were often incongruent with morphology-based taxonomy. For example, two genetically shallow clades contained individuals referable to at least five described species, whereas a single described species contained deep divergences indicative of multiple cryptic species. These findings indicate that morphology-based taxonomy has both overestimated and underestimated actual species diversity (depending on the species), an interpretation supported by two molecular species-delimitation procedures. Based on these findings, we synonymise C. glaucus (Lynch, 1967) and C. stuarti (Lynch, 1967) with C. xucanebi (Stuart, 1941). We also synonymise C. nefrens (Smith, 2005) and C. cyanochthebius McCranie & Smith, 2006 with C. campbelli (Smith, 2005). The molecular data also support multiple undescribed species, notably within C. decoratus (Taylor, 1942). Overall, we show how morphology-based species delimitation can both underestimate and overestimate species richness in morphologically conservative groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]