| Summary: | Trabajo presentado en II Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology (Evolution), celebrado en Montpellier (Francia), del 19 al 22 de agosto de 2018 With a diversity approaching 300 species, squirrels inhabit all the world's biomes and almost all the continents (except Antarctica and Australia), which makes them an exceptional group for studying ecological preferences evolution. Therefore, we tested one of the predictions of the resource-use hypothesis proposed by E.S. Vrba, which foretells that generalist species have lower diversification rates than specialist species, on 229 species of Sciuridae (Rodentia, Mammalia). We compared speciation rates between biome specialists (stenobiomic species) and biome generalists (eurybiomic species) using the biomic specialization index (BSI), which is based on the number of biomes occupied by each species. Furthermore, we performed an ancestral reconstruction of biomic specialization in a calibrated phylogenetic tree. Our results are consistent with the predictions of the resource-use hypothesis, which foretells a higher speciation rate of lineages restricted to a single biome (BSI = 1) than lineages which occupied several biomes (generalists, 1 Peer reviewed
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