The flattop mountains (tepuis) of South America inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write of dinosaurs in modern times inhabiting summits in The Lost World. Although tepuis are obviously not home to long-isolated dinosaurs, these summits are inhabited by many species found nowhere else on Earth.

 

The tepuis formed about 60–90mya after a once extensive plateau underwent several periods of erosion starting around 300mya, which left hundreds of isolated plateaus rising from the surrounding lowlands. The longest-standing hypothesis for summit endemicity (Lost World Hypothesis) suggests taxa have been isolated on summits since their formation. The bulk of this work is part of my PhD thesis, and I was very fortunate to be featured in news articles and popular press.

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Biogeography and phylogeography of Tepuihyla. I used molecular dating techniques to estimate the dates at which these lineages diverged from one another. The oldest among-species divergence for the endemic genus Tepuihyla is 5my, indicating a relatively recent colonization of tepui summits, ~55my after tepui formation. This was the first published study to explicitly test the myth of the Lost World and to find a lack of support for this hypothesis. I also estimated species boundaries and phylogeography of the disjunct T. edelcae, distributed in two isolated mountain tops, which we found to be three separate yet morphologically cryptic lineages with possible concurrent speciation. 

 

 

Conservation genomics of Tepuihyla edelcae and Stefania ginesi. To further understand the reasons behind the extensive endemism on the tepui summits, and to determine if tepuis promote higher rates of summit divergence and speciation by acting as barriers to migration, I estimated the effect of the tepui landscape on two co-distributed frogs that inhabit the Chimantá massif in Venezuela. I obtained thousands of loci using next-generation sequencing to estimate population structure and divergence of summit populations atop three summits, and found populations to be highly isolated despite their very close geographic proximity (between 15–30m), suggesting that this pristine yet drastic landscape may induce strong ecological and geographic barriers to dispersal. This work is still ongoing so stay tuned for updates! 

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