A new Dominican amber fossil of the derived fern genus Pleopeltis confirms generic stasis in the epiphytic fern diversity of the West Indies

One of the grand objectives in the integration of fossils and phylogenetics is to obtain support for macroecological and macroevolutionary hypotheses. Here, we provide new evidence from Dominican amber fossils, which supports a likely stasis in the generic composition of epiphytic plant communities in the West Indies for at least 16 million years. The proposed hypothesis is based on the discovery of the first fossil of the Neotropical fern genus...