Data from: Diversification rates have declined in the Malagasy herpetofauna

The evolutionary origins of Madagascar's biodiversity remain
mysterious despite the fact that relative to land area, there is no other
place with consistently high levels of species richness and endemism
across a range of taxonomic levels. Most efforts to explain
diversification on the island have focused on geographical models of
speciation, but recent studies have begun to address the island's
accumulation of species through time, although with conflicting results.
Prevailing hypotheses for diversification on the island involve either
constant diversification rates or scenarios where rates decline through
time. Using relative-time-calibrated phylogenies for seven endemic
vertebrate clades and a model-fitting framework, I find evidence that
diversification rates have declined through time on Madagascar. I show
that diversification rates have clearly declined throughout the history of
each clade, and models invoking diversity-dependent reductions to
diversification rates best explain the diversification histories for each
clade. These results are consistent with the ecological theory of adaptive
radiation, and, coupled with ancillary observations about ecomorphological
and life-history evolution, strongly suggest that adaptive radiation was
an important formative process for one of the most species-rich regions on
the Earth. These results cast the Malagasy biota in a new light and
provide macroevolutionary justification for conservation initiatives.