Emily Roycroft

Australian National University | ANU · Research School of Biology (RSB)

The estimation of robust and accurate measures of branch support has proven challenging in the era of phylogenomics. In datasets of potentially millions of sites, bootstrap support for bifurcating relationships around very short internal branches can be inappropriately inflated. Such over-estimation of branch support may be particularly problematic...

Closely related species that occur across steep environmental gradients often display clear body size differences, and examining this pattern is crucial to understanding how environmental variation shapes diversity. Australian endemic rodents in the Pseudomys Division (Muridae: Murinae) have repeatedly colonized the arid, monsoon, and mesic biomes...

The repeated evolution of convergent or analogous traits is often used as evidence for adaptive evolution. Squamate reptiles show a high degree of convergence in a variety of morphological traits; however, the evolutionary mechanisms driving these patterns are not fully understood. Here, we investigate the evolution of tail spines, a trait that evo...

Adaptive radiations are characterised by the diversification and ecological differentiation of species, and replicated cases of this process provide natural experiments for understanding the repeatability and pace of molecular evolution. During adaptive radiation, genes related to ecological specialisation may be subject to recurrent positive direc...

Australia has the highest historically recorded rate of mammalian extinction in the world, with 34 terrestrial species declared extinct since European colonization in 1788. Among Australian mammals, rodents have been the most severely affected by these recent extinctions ; however, given a sparse historical record, the scale and timing of their dec...

What factors drive diversification in species groups with wide distributions and high morphological disparity? Pavón‐Vázquez et al. (2021) use an extensive morphological and phylogenetic dataset to investigate patterns of diversification in monitor lizards (Varanidae). They find contrasting drivers of speciation and morphological diversity across c...

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi is a globally significant biodiversity hotspot with substantial undescribed biota, particularly blood-borne parasites of endemic wildlife. Documenting the blood parasites of Sulawesi's murine rodents is the first fundamental step towards the discovery of pathogens likely to be of concern for the health and conserva...

Selective pressures driving dispersal in vagile species often differ between males and females, resulting in sex-biased dispersal. Male-biased dispersal is common in mammals, where there is greater reproductive investment by females, and there is emerging evidence for a similar pattern in elasmobranchs. We examine the population structure of the sh...

Do primary radiations inhibit the persistence and diversification of secondary colonizers? Rowsey et al. (2019) test predictions of this “incumbency effect” by contrasting patterns of morphological variation in two murine rodent clades on the Philippine island of Luzon. They find that in this system, primary colonizers may impose constraints via bi...

Spatial responses of species to past climate change depend on both intrinsic traits (climatic niche breadth, dispersal rates) and the scale of climatic fluctuations across the landscape. New capabilities in generating and analysing population genomic data, along with spatial modelling, have unleashed our capacity to infer how past climate changes h...

Genetic rescue is an under-utilised conservation strategy used to boost the genetic diversity and/or fitness of small, isolated populations through the introduction of novel genes. Effective implementation of genetic rescue requires an understanding of the evolutionary history and genetic distinctiveness of populations. The Eltham copper butterfly...