Fig. 4. Evolution in body size and niche at high interference competition: recurrent inverse Cope’s rule.

a Schematic illustration of phylogenetic pattern. b–e Trait combinations in the coevolving community at four successive times. Orange arrowheads show species’ current trait values and the current directions of the selection pressures governing their evolutionary change. Blue motion trails represent species’ evolutionary trajectories, with their thickness being proportional to species’ population densities and with the darkest blue corresponding to the current time. Green circles and red crosses, respectively, indicate past trait combinations at which evolutionary diversifications and species extinctions occurred. In this macroevolutionary pattern, evolutionary diversification occurs at large body sizes: all species then evolve toward smaller body sizes, punctuated by the recurrent extinction of the smallest species. For a full dynamical rendering of the shown community coevolution, see Supplementary Movie S4. Parameters as shown in Table 1, with $\alpha$ = 0.5 and $ϵ$ = 0.005.