The temperate marine Peruvian Province: How history accounts for its unusual biota.

The Peruvian Province, from 6° S in Peru to 42° S in Chile, is a highly productive coastal marine region whose biology and fossil record have long been studied separately but never integrated. To understand how past events and conditions affected today's species composition and interactions, we examined the role of extinction, colonization, geologic changes to explain previously unrecognized peculiar features of the biota and to compare the Peruvian Province's history to that of other climatically similar temperate coasts. We synthesized all available data on the benthic (or benthically feeding) biota, with emphasis on fossilizable taxa, for the interval from the Miocene (23-5.

Correction: Diversification dynamics, species sorting, and changes in the functional diversity of marine benthic gastropods during the Pliocene-Quaternary at temperate western South America.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Diversification dynamics, species sorting, and changes in the functional diversity of marine benthic gastropods during the Pliocene-Quaternary at temperate western South America.

Functional diversity based on species traits is a powerful tool to investigate how changes in species richness and composition affect ecosystem functioning. However, studies aimed at understanding changes in functional diversity over large temporal and spatial scales are still scant. Here we evaluate the combined effect of diversification and species sorting on functional diversity of fossil marine gastropods during the Pliocene-Quaternary transition in the Pacific coast of South America.

The evolution of seabirds in the Humboldt Current: new clues from the Pliocene of Central Chile.

Background: During the last decade, new Neogene fossil assemblages from South America have revealed important clues about the evolution of seabird faunas in one of the major upwelling systems of the world: the Humboldt Current. However, most of this record comes from arid Northern Chile and Southern Peru and, in consequence, our knowledge of the evolutionary history of seabirds in the temperate transitional zone is negligible. A new Late Pliocene assemblage of fossil birds from the coastal locality of Horcon in Central Chile offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap.