Los pájaros olvidados: Los granívoros extintos de la macaronesia
2016
Evolutionary studies of insular biotas are based on extant species
despite such biotas represent reduced subsets of original faunas due
to Late-Quaternary extinction events mediated by man. Therefore,
the extinction of many taxa makes difficult to obtain a full understanding
of the evolutionary history and ecological interactions of
extant species. Morphological bill variation of common and blue
chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs and F. teydea) has been studied in Macaronesia.
Character displacement between both species has been
argued to explain bill sizes. However, this explanation is incomplete,
as similar bill patterns are recorded in common chaffinch populations
from islands with and without blue chaffinches. The existence
of several species of extinct greenfinches with variation in their beak
sizes, suggests that the character displacement among extinct and
extant finches has influenced patterns of divergence on these
islands. Morphological analyses of an extinct species of Tenerife, the
slender billed greenfinch Carduelis aurelioi, radiocarbon dating and
the time of colonization and diversification among the extant finch
species obtained from DNA sequences, provide the strongest evidence
for these ancient interactions. Such a system with extinct and
extant species prompts a re-thinking of the evolutionary and biogeographic
history of macaronesian finches, where extinct taxa
emerge as key species to understand the morphology and variation
of the extant birds.
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