Why are there more types of plants and animals on some parts of the Earth's surface than on others, and do these patterns point to the operation of some basic laws of nature that have yet to be fully understood? Over the past three decades, answers to these questions have shifted from essentially ecological to much more evolutionary (7). This shift largely results from the rapid growth in phylogenetic studies, which has led to a proliferation of time-calibrated evolutionary trees, and from the advent of large, analytical databases. Using the latter, it is now possible to assemble vast amounts of spatial and temporal data on the distribution of plants and animals to establish statistically significant biogeographic patterns. On page 767 of this issue, Krug et al. use this approach to provide important new insights into how biodiversity evolved over the past 200 million years (2).
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