Innovation and Introgression in the Continental Radiations of Fagaceae Across the Northern Hemisphere

Paul S. Manos

Published May 2023 in International Oaks No. 34: 45–58

Abstract

Northern Hemisphere forests changed drastically in the early Eocene, 50 million years ago, with the diversification of the oaks and their relatives. Cooling climates over the next 20 million years fostered the spread of temperate biomes that became increasingly dominated by the Fagaceae.

Here I provide a chronicle to the results of a collaborative project (Zhou et al. 2022) that resolved major evolutionary events, including support for the origin of the oaks and evidence for ancient genome-wide signatures of hybridization across the family using analyses of nuclear and chloroplast genomes.

Ecological correlations related to animal dispersal and mutualism with fungi are implicated in triggering waves of continental radiations beginning with the origin of major lineages just after the K-Pg (aka K-T) mass extinction event, 66 million years ago. Movement of genes between species was detected at multiple time scales suggesting that hybridization has long been part of the genetic legacy of Fagaceae.

As the major oak lineages moved into their current ranges in the early Miocene, hybridization likely occurred between ancestral species of sections: Ilex and Cerris, Virentes and Quercus, Protobalanus and Quercus, and Ponticae and Quercus. Some of these historical hybridization events may have resulted in an adaptive advantage for the species involved.

Keywords

floristic transitions, speciation, fossil-calibrated phylogeny, hypogeous cotyledons, hybridization

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