Podcast 202 - The Great Plant American Interchange

The gang discusses two papers that examine the roles of competition, biogeography, and niche evolution in macroevolution. The first paper looks at the expansion of angiosperms and correlates it with the extinction of gymnosperms, and the second paper looks at the complex ways the Great American Interchange affected niches in South America. Meanwhile, Amanda goes for the eyes, James has a device, and Curt gives sound penguin "facts".   Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition): Today our friends talk about two papers that talk about how things can act on other things but maybe not really. The first paper looks at green things that don't move. There are two sorts of green things that don't move, pointed ones and paper-like ones. Pointed ones today live in the UP or other high places like big tall places or cold places, or places with bad ground. Paper-like ones live all places and are even the stuff you need to cut in the summer. People think the paper-like ones were better at making it than the pointed ones, so they beat the pointed ones after the time of the big angry animals with no hair and big teeth and so now live in all places. This paper shows that maybe that is part of it, but also maybe it is very hard to see and might be from lots of different things, even things like the world getting cold. (But the paper has a story and says it is maybe most that they were better at making it, which might not be true.) The second paper looks at a time when the high places and low places in the "new half" of the world came together and different things moved high while others moved low. It was thought that maybe things from the high places were better at making it, but looking at the types of green things that the  moving things were eating shows that even before the two places came together, the green things were already changing and things could change with them.   References:  Reeves, Jane C., et al. "Evolution of ecospace occupancy by Mesozoic marine tetrapods." Palaeontology (2020). Lautenschlager, Stephan, et al. "Morphological convergence obscures functional diversity in sabre-toothed carnivores." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287.1935 (2020): 20201818.