Leprieur, Fabien Descombes, Patrice Gaboriau, Théo Cowman, Peter F. Parravicini, Valeriano Kulbicki, Michel Melián, Carlos J. Santana, Charles N. de Heine, Christian Mouillot, David Bellwood, David R. Pellissier, Loïc 2016-05-06 The Cretaceous breakup of Gondwana strongly modified the global distribution of shallow tropical seas reshaping the geographic configuration of marine basins. However, the links between tropical reef availability, plate tectonic processes and marine biodiversity distribution patterns are still unknown. Here, we show that a spatial diversification model constrained by absolute plate motions for the past 140 million years predicts the emergence and movement of diversity hotspots on tropical reefs. The spatial dynamics of tropical reefs explains marine fauna diversification in the Tethyan Ocean during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic, and identifies an eastward movement of ancestral marine lineages towards the Indo-Australian Archipelago in the Miocene. A mechanistic model based only on habitat-driven diversification and dispersal yields realistic predictions of current biodiversity patterns for both corals and fishes. As in terrestrial systems, we demonstrate that plate tectonics played a major role in driving tropical marine shallow reef biodiversity dynamics. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/304989 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/304989/files/pel_ptd.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1038/ncomms11461 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined Nature Communications. - 2016, vol. 7, p. 11461 info:eu-repo/classification/udc/57 Plate tectonics drive tropical reef biodiversity dynamics http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501