Congratulations to Pat for her recent publication! Make sure to check it out.
This paper is the first chapter of my dissertation. It’s a broad overview, or “first pass”, at revealing the phylogenetic history of a species-rich group of neotropical plants. The results show that the major evolutionary lineages within this group don’t correspond well with what taxonomists have long thought them to be. Most notably, fleshy (animal-dispersed) fruits have evolved independently multiple times from dry-fruited ancestors. Because this group of plants is recently radiated, further untangling its evolutionary history is tricky, and subsequent chapters of my thesis (in preparation) will deal with this challenge by breaking the the tribe up into component clades, to examine each in more detail. This paper was an invited submission to a special volume of Bot J Linn Soc on neotropical botany, put together by the organizers of a symposium at the International Botanical Congress that I participated in last year. They imposed deadlines on submission and revision, which were very helpful for getting the writing done in a timely fashion! -Pat
Here’s Pat’s paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8339.2012.01305.x/full
