relatively low historic losses in North and South America may reflect that the massive prehistoric loss already had removed most sensitive species. Conversely, the lower prehistoric loss in South-East Asia and potential survival of relatively sensitive species could explain its large historic losses and higher fraction of threatened species compared to America (Sodhi 2010). Our results would thus be analogous to geographic et al., patterns of threatened and extinct species discussed for birds under the framework on extinction filters by Balmford (1996). Since we are only analyzing known species, we may underestimate of the diversity loss in poorly sampled places. We note, however, that a recent detailed study from India (which is one of the least sampled areas in tropical Asia) did not recover a single extinct species in their sampling from five time periods spanning the last 200,000 years (Roberts 2014). The small tropical Asian megafauna extinction is therefore very likely to be et al. real although a few additional extinct species may be recovered with additional sampling. We are much more skeptical about tropical Australia where we suspect that the lack of megafauna in the Natural diversities could be a sampling artefact. The patterns in phylogenetic diversity deficits are similar to those for species diversity, although generally smaller (Fig. 2). This is most striking in Australia, which appears to have suffered substantially lower phylogenetic losses relative to its species losses. A potential reason may be that marsupials appear to have a higher evolutionary ecological plasticity than placental mammals, so that phylogenetic clades are less ecologically specialized and thus less consistently sensitive to the same pressures. Exemplifying this,
relatively low historic losses in North and South America may reflect that the massive prehistoric loss already had removed most sensitive species. Conversely, the lower prehistoric loss in South-East Asia and potential survival of relatively sensitive species could explain its large historic losses and higher fraction of threatened species compared to America (Sodhi et al., 2010). Our results would thus be analogous to geographic patterns of threatened and extinct species discussed for birds under the framework on extinction filters by Balmford (1996). Since we are only analyzing known species, we may underestimate of the diversity loss in poorly sampled places. We note, however, that a recent detailed study from India (which is one of the least sampled areas in tropical Asia) did not recover a single extinct species in their sampling from five time periods spanning the last 200,000 years (Roberts et al. 2014). The small tropical Asian megafauna extinction is therefore very likely to be real although a few additional extinct species may be recovered with additional sampling. We are much more skeptical about tropical Australia where we suspect that the lack of megafauna in the Natural diversities could be a sampling artefact. The patterns in phylogenetic diversity deficits are similar to those for species diversity, although generally smaller (Fig. 2). This is most striking in Australia, which appears to have suffered substantially lower phylogenetic losses relative to its species losses. A potential reason may be that marsupials appear to have a higher evolutionary ecological plasticity than placental mammals, so that phylogenetic clades are less ecologically specialized and thus less consistently sensitive to the same pressures. Exemplifying this,
faurby_svenning_DDI_2015.pdf.docx