Most contemporary studies of adaptive radiation focus on relatively recent and geographically restricted clades. It is less clear whether diversification of ancient clades spanning entire continents is consistent with adaptive radiation. We used novel fossil calibrations to generate a chronogram of Neotropical cichlid fishes and to test whether patterns of lineage and morphological diversification are congruent with hypothesized adaptive radiations in South and Central America. We found that diversification in the Neotropical cichlid clade and the highly diverse tribe Geophagini was consistent with diversity-dependent, early bursts of divergence followed by decreased rates of lineage accumulation. South American Geophagini underwent early rapid differentiation in body shape, expanding into novel morphological space characterized by elongate-bodied predators. Divergence in head-shape attributes associated with trophic specialization evolved under strong adaptive constraints in all Neotropical cichlid clades. The South American Cichlasomatini followed patterns consistent with constant rates of morphological divergence. Although morphological diversification in South American Heroini was limited, Eocene invasion of Central American habitats was followed by convergent diversification mirroring variation observed in Geophagini. Diversification in Neotropical cichlids was influenced by the early adaptive radiation of Geophagini, which potentially limited differentiation in other cichlid clades.
BEAST XML file used for dating
This file contains the executable XML file that generates the chronogram used in the paper as described in the methods. Output from running this file in BEAST 1.6.2 was used to generate the Maximum Clade Credibility chronogram and the set of 1000 randomly sampled posterior chronograms used in all analyses performed in the paper.
López_Fernandez et al BEAST XML file.xml
López-Fernández et al CichlinaeMCC chronogram
This file contains a Newick-formatted version of the MCC chronogram of Neotropical cichlids used in all lineage and phenotypic analyses. African, Indian and Madagascan taxa used for cichlid dating in the BEAST run have been pruned for analysis of Neotropical taxa. This file is directly readable in the relevant R packages used in the paper. This chronogram was pruned to generate trees for the clades Geophagini, Cichlasomatini and Heroini as needed for analysis presented in the paper.
López-Fernández et al Cichlinae1000 chronograms
This file contains 1000 Newick-formatted trees of Neotropical cichlids obtained by randomly sampling the posterior distribution of trees obtained from the BEAST search performed using the XML file provided. African, Indian and Madagascan taxa used for cichlid dating in the BEAST run have been pruned for analysis of Neotropical taxa. This file is directly readable in the relevant R packages used in the paper. These chronograms were pruned to generate 1000-tree sets for the clades Geophagini, Cichlasomatini and Heroini as needed for analysis presented in the paper.
López-Fernández et al morphometric data
This file contains the raw values for Standard Length and 8 morphometric variables used for phenotypic analyses as described in the methods. Data are presented for each individual specimen used, providing also the museum catalog number for each specimen. See text of the paper for details of transformations and analyses.
López-Fernández et al body size data
This file contains the untransformed maximum body size data per species used in the analyses. See text of the paper for details of analyses.