Professor Marcel Cardillo ‘Grevillea/Hakea: the story of a remarkable evolutionary radiation’

The genera Grevillea and Hakea form one of Australia’s most spectacular and successful evolutionary radiations, with at least 650 species distributed almost ubiquitously across the continent. Our team at ANU have spent over a decade piecing together the story of this remarkable group: its origins and evolutionary history, its current patterns of diversity, and its prospects for the future under rapid environmental change. I will talk about the story of Grevillea/Hakea , as far we  now know it, and what this group can tell us more generally about how climatic and biogeographic changes over tens of millions of years have shaped the Australian flora as we see it today.

Marcel Cardillo is a professor with the Macroevolution and Macroecology Group, in the Research School of Biology, Australian National University. His work focuses on computational analysis of large biodiversity datasets and aims to understand the evolutionary history and present-day conservation of biodiversity.