Aim Testing the impact of climate on diversification is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Birth‐death models like palaeoenvironment‐dependent diversification (PDD) models, for example, allow exploring the potential correlations between diversification dynamics and past environmental changes, such as temperature, among other abiotic variables. So far, such studies have been limited to proxy‐derived global temperature trends...

Connaraceae is a pantropical family of about 200 species containing lianas and small trees with remarkably diverse floral polymorphisms, including distyly, tristyly, homostyly, and dioecy. To date, relationships within the family have not been investigated using a targeted molecular phylogenetic treatment, severely limiting systematic understanding and reconstruction of trait evolution. Accordingly, their last infrafamilial cl...

Unravelling variation among taxonomic orders regarding the rate of evolution in microsatellites is crucial for evolutionary biology and population genetics research. The mean mutation rate of microsatellites tends to be lower in arthropods than in vertebrates, but data are scarce and mostly concern accumulation of mutations in model species. Based on parent–offspring segregations and a hierarchical Bayesian model, the mean rat...

Genome scans using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers became popular in nonmodel species within the last 10 years, but few studies have tried to characterize the anonymous outliers identified. This study follows on from an AFLP genome scan in the black rat ( Rattus rattus ), the reservoir of plague ( Yersinia pestis infection) in Madagascar. We successfully sequenced 17 of the 22 markers previously shown to...

Most models of ecological speciation concern phytophagous insects in which speciation is thought to be driven by host shifts and subsequent adaptations of populations. Despite the ever‐increasing number of studies, the current evolutionary status of most models remains incompletely resolved, as estimates of gene flow between taxa remain extremely rare. We studied the population genetics of two taxa of the Ostrinia genus — one...

The evolutionary importance of hybridization in wild plants and animals has become increasingly widely recognized in the last decade. In practical terms, hybridization provides an exceptionally tough set of problems for conservation biologists. We illustrate this in a case study of two Carabidae species widely used to evaluate the impact of human activities on biodiversity. These two species live in a complex mosaic of sympatr...

This study compares the properties of dominant markers, such as amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs), with those of codominant multiallelic markers, such as microsatellites, in reconstructing parentage. These two types of markers were used to search for both parents of an individual without prior knowledge of their relationships, by calculating likelihood ratios based on genotypic data, including mistyping. Experime...