Disentangling Ancient Interactions: A New Extinct Passerine Provides Insights on Character Displacement among Extinct and Extant Island Finches

摘要: Background Evolutionary studies of insular biotas are based mainly on extant taxa, although such represent artificial subsets original faunas because human-caused extinctions indigenous species augmented by introduced exotic taxa. This makes it difficult to obtain a full understanding the history ecological interactions between sympatric species. Morphological bill variation Fringilla coelebs and F. teydea (common blue chaffinches) has been previously studied in North Atlantic Macaronesian archipelagos. Character displacement both argued explain sizes sympatry. However, this explanation is incomplete, as similar patterns size have recorded populations from islands with without teydea.