Assessing the long-term stability of adaptive radiations using the fossil record

The proposed research uses an interdisciplinary approach to study diversification and extinction processes in changing environments. Adaptive radiation, the process whereby organisms diversify to fulfill a variety of ecological roles, is responsible for producing many of the spectacular ecological communities on our planet. But whether the ecological communities generated from adaptive radiations persist over long timescales–and the extent to which they are reshaped by environmental change–remains an unresolved question.

This project will reconstruct morphological diversity in a model system–the Anolis lizards of the Caribbean–to evaluate the longevity of morphological diversity generated by adaptive radiations. This research bridges the biological sciences and the geosciences, providing an interdisciplinary platform to train a diverse set of students, including undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds and students who are training to become K-12 STEM teachers.

Additionally, 3 dimensional models of skulls generated by this project will be used to develop new educational modules on morphological evolution and diversity change through time that will be deployed in undergraduate and high school classrooms.

The proposed research provides significant information in four main areas: (1) characterizing how species partition morphospace in an adaptive radiation; (2) establishing whether ecological communities persist over geologic timescales; (3) identifying the nature of phenotypic change over geological timescales; and (4) determining if shifts in phenotypic diversity are correlated to environmental changes. These issues will be addressed through the creation of a comprehensive, high-resolution X-ray chromatography dataset of extant Anolis species from alcohol-preserved museum specimens and integration of those data with Anolis fossil specimens from throughout the Greater Antilles.

The research is relevant to evolutionary biologists, ecologists, paleontologists, and will be particularly instructive in identifying how ecological communities might change in the future.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.