Diverging evolutionary trajectories for palm seed sizes in mainland Africa and Madagascar

Seed size is a trait which determines survival rates for individual plants and can vary as a result of numerous trade-offs. In the palm family (Arecaceae) today, there is great variation in seed sizes. Past studies attempting to establish drivers for palm seed evolution have sometimes yielded contradictory findings in part because modern seed size variations are complicated by long-term legacies, including biogeographic differences across lineages. Here, we examined palm seed size evolution in two adjacent regions (mainland Africa and Madagascar) utilizing single- and multi-regime Brownian Motion and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. We explicitly take into account species’ evolutionary histories to investigate whether there may be shared evolutionary pressures over regional scales. We found that regional selection pressures do exist for palm seed lengths, but these pressures are distinct in mainland Africa and Madagascar, despite the two regions’ proximity. Our study indicates that evoluti..., , , # Diverging evolutionary trajectories for palm seed sizes in mainland Africa and Madagascar

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxfk](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxfk)

## Description of the data files

1. 20_trees.RSave: Loading the RSave file into your R environment will load in a vector of integers (“run_trees”), which contains the indices for the tree topologies used in the main analysis for 20 random trees selected from Faurby et al. (2016)’s 1000-tree posterior distribution.
2. MainAnalysis_hOUwieModels.zip: These files are created as the output of running the hOUwie_models.R file. The Rsave files contain hOUwie models for each tree topology in the main analysis. These files are housed in folders corresponding to the index of the tree topology used, selected from Faurby et al. (2016)’s 1000-tree posterior distribution. All models in folders that are named “tree_#” were run hOUwie parameter values nSim = 5 and nStarts = 25. Loading the RSave files for each model will load i...