Evolution of diet across the animal Tree of Life

What an animal eats is a fundamental aspect of its biology, but the evolution of diet has not been studied across animal phylogeny. Here, we performed a large-scale phylogenetic analysis to address three unresolved questions about the evolution of animal diets. (i) Are diets conserved across animal phylogeny? (ii) Does diet influence rates of species proliferation (diversification) among animal phyla? (iii) What was the ancestral diet of animals and major animal clades? We analyzed diet data for 1,087 taxa, proportionally sampled among animal phyla based on the relative species richness of phyla. Our survey suggests that across animals, carnivory is most common (~63%), herbivory less common (~32%), and omnivory relatively rare (~3%). Despite considerable controversy over whether ecological traits are conserved or labile, we found strong conservatism in diet over extraordinarily deep timescales. We found that diet is unrelated to rates of species diversification across animal phyla, cont...