bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.23.916817; this version posted January 24, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Signals of recent tropical radiations in Cunoniaceae, an iconic family for understanding Southern Hemisphere biogeography Ricardo A. Segovia1,2, Andy R. Griffiths1, Diego Arenas3, A. A. Piyali Dias1,4, Kyle G. Dexter1,4 1 School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. 2 Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (www.ieb-chile.cl), Santiago, Chile. 3 School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. 4 Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, United Kingdom. *
[email protected] Abstract Extratropical angiosperm diversity is thought to have arisen from lineages that originated in the more diverse tropics, but studies of dispersal be- tween tropical and extratropical environments and their consequences for diversification are rare. In order to understand the evolutionary effects of shifts between the tropics and extratropics, defined here as areas that do versus do not regularly experience freezing temperatures, we studied the biogeographic history and associated diversification patterns of Cunoniaceae. We mapped the distribution of all species in the family and combined this with a newly constructed phylogeny for the family. The family shows a long evolutionary association with both tropical and extratropical environments, the tropics house considerably greater species richness of Cunoniaceae. In- deed, both tropical and extratropical environments appear to have had a similar number of lineages until 12 Ma, after which time the number of lineages in tropical areas increased at a faster rate.