Abstract
Recent evidence that freshwater fishes diversify faster than marine fishes signifies that the evolutionary history of biodiversity in freshwater system is of particular interest. Here, the evolutionary diversification events of African Cyprinidae, a freshwater fish family with wide geographic distribution, were reconstructed and analysed. The overall diversification rate of African Cyprinidae is 0.08 species per million year (when extinction rate is very high, i.e., ε = 0.9) and 0.11 species per million year (when ε = 0). This overall rate is lower than the rate reported for African Cichlids, suggesting that African freshwaters might be less conducive for a rapid diversification of Cyprinidae. However, the observed diversification events of African Cyprinidae occurred in the last 10 million years. The temporal pattern of these events follows a non-constant episodic birth-death model (Bayes Factor > 28) and the rate-constant model never outperformed any of the non-constant models tested. The fact that most diversification events occurred in the last 10 million years supports the pattern reported for Cyprinidae in other continent, e.g., Asia, perhaps pointing to concomitant diversification globally. However, the diversification events coincided with major geologic and paleo-climatic events in Africa, suggesting that geological and climatic events may have mediated the diversification patterns of Cyprinidae on the continent.