Abstract
The origin and distribution of current biodiversity has fascinated biologists for a long time. The current development of computational tools coupled with the widespread use of genetic data is changing our understanding of the macroevolutionary processes affecting species diversification. I will present several examples where phylogenetic trees are combined with extensive ecological and morphological data to test several hypotheses related to species evolution and adaptation. These examples lead to several new developments that extend current evolutionary models and further extend the potential use of these models to analyse the evolution of phenotypic traits in a comparative framework.
Nicolas Salamin
Head of the Computational Phylogenetics group
University of Lausanne