Evolutionary biology recovered its status after the re-establishment of democracy, and it is currently experiencing an exciting and renewed diversification period that has led to the foundation of the Chilean Society of Evolutionary Biology, the only scientific society for the study of evolution in Latin America.
Since the Zaprionus genus and the melanogaster subgroup seem to share the same age of origin and diversification in tropical Africa, as well as ecological features, our data suggest that they passed through a permissive period of transposable element invasion during the diversification period.
In clade B, the branching pattern among main clades/lineages remains unresolved (ML bootstrap values: <50-50%, Bayesian posterior probabilities: 0.56-0.74) indicating a diversification within a short time period.
Whilst backed bladelet production is broadly shared across the different regions of North and East Africa, there was also a level of regional cultural diversity during this period, possibly mirroring a diversification of populations.
Diversification within the complex coincided with a period of diversification that occurred broadly across the plant and animal kingdoms and is most likely associated with major climatic and tectonic events.
Although this pattern cannot be used to determine if the mutations were originally fixed by natural selection, conservation after an ancient diversification indicates a long period of stasis, consistent with purifying selection on adaptive, alternative amino acid states.
Rapid radiation and difficulties in inferring relationships among lineages united by short nodes is a problem in phylogenetic analyses of many insect groups that have undergone spectacular diversification in a short period of time in the Cretaceous-Tertiary [ 18].
This pattern follows into the Lujanian SALMA, when the genus likely experienced a second period of diversification, with several species occurring sympatrically: T. olivaresi, T cristatellus, T. mesopotamicus, T. rioplatensis, T. tarijensis [ 27].
Against this "Cambrian explosion" hypothesis, it has been argued that limitations of the fossil record may have obscured the earlier evolutionary history of the Metazoa [ 2, 14], and it therefore remains possible that the metazoan phyla arose not by an explosive radiation, but by a long period of diversification [ 15].
A long diversification fuse would be caused by a long period of very low diversification followed by a rapid increase in diversification rate, while the alternative invokes a period of high levels of extinction rates producing ghost lineages that remain unsampled in a tree of only extant lineages [ 47, 48].
