TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pfenninger, Markus
A1  - Schwenk, Klaus
T1  - Cryptic animal species are homogeneously distributed among taxa and biogeographical regions
T2  - BMC evolutionary biology
N2  - Background Cryptic species are two or more distinct but morphologically similar species that were classified as a single species. During the past two decades we observed an exponential growth of publications on cryptic species. Recently published reviews have demonstrated cryptic species have profound consequences on many biological disciplines. It has been proposed that their distribution is non-random across taxa and biomes. Results We analysed a literature database for the taxonomic and biogeographical distribution of cryptic animal species reports. Results from regression analysis indicate that cryptic species are almost evenly distributed among major metazoan taxa and biogeographical regions when corrected for species richness and study intensity. Conclusion This indicates that morphological stasis represents an evolutionary constant and that cryptic metazoan diversity does predictably affect estimates of earth´s animal diversity. Our findings have direct theoretical and practical consequences for a number of prevailing biological questions with regard to global biodiversity estimates, conservation efforts and global taxonomic initiatives.
Y1  - 2007
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/731
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-47146
N1  - © 2007 Pfenninger and Schwenk; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 7
IS  - 121
SP  - 1
EP  - 6
ER  -