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Phylogenomics and Fossilized Birth-Death Dating Reveals Gondawanan Origin and Extensive Post-Cretaceous Diversification of Worldwide Cicadidae.

Created on 11 Nov 2025

Authors

Stukel, M., Matzke, N. J., Douglas, J., Ruschel, T. P., Puissant, S., Price, B. W., Villet, M., Lemmon, A. R., Lemmon, E., Simon, C.

Abstract

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction resulted in a massive turnover in biodiversity. The oldest fossils of the globally-distributed insect family Cicadidae date to the Paleocene, suggesting that this family diversified after the K-Pg boundary. We analyzed 490 nuclear Anchored Hybrid Enrichment loci as well as mitochondrial genomes for the Cicadidae, sampling all five subfamilies, 85% of tribes, and 25% of genera, using concatenated maximum-likelihood and multi-species coalescent approaches to resolve the phylogenetic relationships of Cicadidae subfamilies. We estimated divergence times of Cicadidae lineages using a fossilized birth-death model augmented into the multispecies coalescent with 44 fossil taxa. We estimated a Cretaceous origin for Cicadidae with four of the five subfamilies diversifying shortly after the K-Pg extinction event. Our fossilized birth-death tip-dating approach improved the precision of age estimates for many cicada clades compared to dates based on node-calibration from previous studies. An ancestral area reconstruction inferred a Gondwanan origin for Cicadidae with multiple lineages dispersing across the planet. Our results augment insight into how the K-Pg mass extinction shaped present-day diversity.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 11 Nov 2025.

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