Evolutionary origins of Gondwanan interactions: How old are Araucaria beetle herbivores?

By A. Sequeira, Brian D. Farrell. 2001

83 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Studies of a variety of phenomena, ranging from rates of molecular substitution to rates of diversification, draw on estimates of geological age. Studies incorporating estimates of timing from fossils or other geological evidence are largely of relatively young, Tertiary divergences, to which older systems may provide useful comparisons. One apparently old assemblage comprises the beetle groups associated with the ancient genus Araucaria that share comparable, ostensibly Gondwanan distributions with their host. Our previous studies suggested a possibly Cretaceous age for Araucaria associations in bark beetles. However, the absence of confirmed bark beetle fossils earlier than the Tertiary has been taken as evidence of Cretaceous absence, and their confirmed phylogenetic position within the primitively angiosperm-feeding weevil family rules out pre-angiosperm, Jurassic origins. Nevertheless, an early shift from angiosperms to Araucaria seemed plausible in the light of Araucaria fossil history which spans the Mesozoic since the Jurassic. To resolve the phylogenetic affinities and to estimate divergence times of the Australian and South American bark beetle genera affiliated with Araucaria we analysed DNA sequences of nuclear and mitochondrial genes: protein coding elongation factor alpha, enolase and cytochrome oxidase I. The most parsimonious reconstruction of the host relationships of Tomicini from the combined dataset corroborates the ancestral association with the genus Araucaria of both South American and Australian Tomicini. Bayesian estimation of divergence times indicates that the divergence between the Australian and the South American Araucaria -feeding taxa occurred at the very latest in the Cretaceous/Paleocene border and that the age of the first Scolytinae–Araucaria association would then be during the later stages of the Late Cretaceous, while other known beetle/Araucaria associations are Jurassic.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0dadcd3e7911375f505e0d1bead9547216bc62e

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Citations in the corpus

Biogeography and diversification of colletid bees (Hymenoptera: Colletidae): emerging patterns from the southern end of the world (2012, background): “…respects (reviewed by McCarthy et al., 2007; Upchurch, 2008), but it is widely accepted that geological events related to the break-up of Gondwana added geographical barriers in a stepwise manner (e.g. Cracraft, 2001; Sequeira & Farrell, 2001; Upchurch et al., 2002; Sanmartı́n & Ronquist, 2004).”
Tropical Intercontinental Disjunctions: Gondwana Breakup, Immigration from the Boreotropics, and Transoceanic Dispersal (2004, background): “…species in South America—also occurred in Australia during the early Cretaceous (Hill and Brodribb 1999); and (4) the basal scolytine beetles that inhabit the bark of Araucaria appear, based on calibrated molecular data, to have shared a common ancestor 78 m.yr. ago (Sequeira and Farrell 2001).”
Weevils, weevils, weevils everywhere* (2007, unknown): “…two groups are traditionally recognised, subfamilies Hylesininae and Scolytinae in Wood’s (1986) classification, but the former has already been shown to be paraphyletic (Sequeira et al. 2000), as have some tribes in either group (Tomicini, Sequeira & Farrell 2001; Dryocoetini, Jordal 2002).”
Clades, Clocks, and Continents: Historical and Biogeographical Analysis of Myrtaceae, Vochysiaceae, and Relatives in the Southern Hemisphere (2004, background): “…in early mammals (Murphy et al. 2001), passerine birds (Edwards and Boles 2002), flightless ratites (Haddrath and Baker 2001), Araucaria beetles (Sequeira and Farrell 2001), and a number of angiosperm clades (Raven and Axelrod 1974; Manos 1997; Renner et al. 2000; Swenson et al. 2001;…”
Ecology and evolution of mycophagous bark beetles and their fungal partners. (2005, background): “Two types of mycangia, oral and prothoracic, have been described in Dendroctonus (Table 1), and the inferred phylogeny of Dendroctonus (Kelley and Farrell, 1998; Sequeira and Farrell 2001) shows that these respective mycangial types are synapomorphic (Fig.”