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An organism’s potential to adapt to a novel environment depends in part upon its history of evolving features requisite in previous environs. Replicate radiations of organisms into a given ecosystem, say – coral reefs, permit one to test such questions as: How has the history of organisms prior to their expansion in the tropics constrained or facilitated their diversification onto reefs? How has the evolution of ecological innovation influenced the tropics as a source or sink for global diversity? We address these questions using comparative phylogenetic methods. Using supertree techniques, we have recently produced the most comprehensive phylogeny of scleractinian corals and the first class-level phylogeny of Holothuroidea, the sea cucumbers, from nucleotide sequences, morphological characters and fossil first occurrances. Using these estimates and comparative methods, we are testing hypotheses with a previously unavailable statistical power about how invertebrates have diversified into and out of a derived environment, scleractinian coral reefs.

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