Michael L. McKinney is professor of geology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. James A. Drake is an associate professor in the Department of Zoology and the Graduate Ecology Program at the University of Tennessee.

• Introduction, by Michael McKinney List of Contributors 1. Biodiversity dynamics: Niche preemption and saturation in diversity equilibria, by Michael McKinney Part I. Phylogenetic Turnover: From Populations Through Higher Taxa 2. Do taxa persist as metapopulations in evolutionary time?, by Susan Harrison 3. Geographic range fragmentation and the evolution of biological diversity, by Brian Maurer and Phillip Nott 4. Detecting ecological pattern in phylogenies, by John Gittleman, C. Anderson, S. Cates, H-K Luh, H. Hilton, N. Leahy, R-L Wan 5. Testing models of speciation and extinction with phylogenetic trees of extant taxa, by Jody Hey, Holly Hinton, Nicholas Leahy, Rong-Lin Wang 6. Dynamics of diversification in state space, by Daniel W. McShea 7. Diversification of body sizes: patterns and processes in the assembly of terrestrial mammal faunas, by Douglas A. Kelt and James H. Brown 8. The role of development in evolutionary radiations, by Gunther J. Eble 9. Declining taxonomic turnover in geologic time, by Norman Gilinsky Part II. Community Turnover: From Populations Through Global Diversity 10. Scaling the ecosystem: A hierarchical view of stasis and change, by Kenneth M. Schopf and Linda C. Ivany 11. Nested patterns of species distribution: processes and implications, by Alan Cutler 12. Diversification of North American mammals: a test of equilibrial dynamics, by John Alroy 13. Scales of diversification and the Ordovician radiation, by Arnold I. Miller and Shuguang Mao 14. Preston's ergodic conjecture: the accumulation of species in space and time, by Michael L. Rosenweig 15. An intermediate disturbance hypothesis of maximal speciation, by Warren Allmon, Paul Morris, Michael McKinney 16. Turnover dynamics across ecological and geological scales, by Gareth Russell 17. Catastrophic fluctuations in nutrient levels as an agent of mass extinction: upward scaling of ecological processes?, by Ronald E. Martin 18. Scale-independent interpretations of macroevolutionary dynamics, by Richard B. Aronson and Roy E. Plotnick References Index