Université de Fribourg

Disproportionate extinction of South American mammals drove the asymmetry of the Great American Biotic Interchange

Carrillo, Juan D. ; Faurby, Søren ; Silvestro, Daniele ; Zizka, Alexander ; Jaramillo, Carlos ; Bacon, Christine D. ; Antonelli, and Alexandre

In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020, vol. 117, no. 42, p. 26281–26287

The biological interchange between North and South America associated with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama is key to defining current gradients of species diversity. A major gap in our understanding of the interchange is its asymmetry, where mammals of North American origin attained higher diversity in South America than vice versa. The prevailing view is that this asymmetry resulted...

Université de Fribourg

The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity

Andermann, Tobias ; Faurby, Søren ; Turvey, Samuel T. ; Antonelli, Alexandre ; Silvestro, Daniele

In: Science Advances, 2020, vol. 6, no. 36, p. eabb2313

To understand the current biodiversity crisis, it is crucial to determine how humans have affected biodiversity in the past. However, the extent of human involvement in species extinctions from the Late Pleistocene onward remains contentious. Here, we apply Bayesian models to the fossil record to estimate how mammalian extinction rates have changed over the past 126,000 years, inferring...