5-6 months internship (2ndyear master-level) on the diversity dynamics
of the Dipodoidea (rodent) at the University of Toulouse, France

Deadline to apply: September 30,2025.

The internship will address a fundamental question in evolution: Why
some clades are poor in species richness? The fact that the tree of life
is highly unbalanced with clades with more species than others has
attracted a lot of attention in the last decades in the scientific
community. Nonetheless, most of the studies focus on groups with
exceptional diversity (e.g Angiosperms) or recent adaptive radiations
(such as cichlids orAnolislizards), and fewer studies have been devoted
to species-poor clades. We propose to study here the processes leading
to species-poor clades.

Based on the fossil record and a new time-calibrated phylogeny of the
rodents Dipodoidea (53 extant species), which is the sister clade of
Muroidea (1500+ species), this internship will test competing hypotheses
to explain the low richness of the clade. Previous diversification
analyses based on fossils and phylogenies both suggested that the
diversity of the group have been expanding and then declining.

Based on both fossil and phylogenetic information, the internship will
investigate this decline and will test two main hypotheses. As the clade
is mainly distributed in dry habitats of the Northern Hemisphere, the
candidate will test with temperature-dependent models whether speciation
rates correlate with cooling climate (the latter being a proxy of
expansion of dry areas). He/She will also test whether the evolution of
limbs adapted to desert environments (from quadrupedal ancestors to fully
bipedal species today) may have caused shifts in diversification rates.

The student will be mainly supervised by Jonathan Rolland (CRBE,
Toulouse), Robin Aguillée (CRBE, Toulouse) and Fabien Condamine (ISEM,
Montpellier), in close collaboration with the researchers from the ROMA
ANR project, such as Raquel Lopez-Antonanzas (ISEM, Montpellier).

At a more local scale, the intern will be based at the Centre de Recherche
sur la Biodiversité et l'Environnement (CRBE) in Toulouse. Our laboratory
combine genetics/genomics, phylogenetics, niche modelling, paleontology
and computational methods to study the spatial and temporal pattern of
biodiversity on earth.

Toulouse is the main city in the South-West of France with a living
atmosphere, located one hour from the Pyrenees mountains, two hours away
from Montpellier and three hours from the Atlantic Ocean.

Gross monthly salary will be 600 euro .The successful candidate is supposed
to move to France (ideally from the beginning of 2026).

Please send your application including (1) a short statement (~1 page)
that describes your research accomplishments and motivation for applying,
including the contact information for one reference (2) a CV. Please
send a copy to Jonathan Rolland (jonathan.rolland@utoulouse.fr),
Robin Aguilée (robin.aguilee@utoulouse.fr) and Fabien Condamine
(Fabien.condamine@umontpellier.fr) as single PDF.

For more information on the research in our respective labs, please
consult:

https://jorolland.wordpress.com,https://robin-aguilee.univ-tlse3.frhttps://fabiencondamine.organdhttps://crbe.cnrs.fr.

Jonathan Rolland <jonathan.rolland@univ-tlse3.fr>

(to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to
golding@mcmaster.ca)