View article

Tropical freshwater lakes are well known for their high biodiversity, and particularly the East African Great Lakes are renowned for their adaptive radiation of cichlid fishes. While comparative phylogenetic analyses of extant species flocks have revealed patterns and processes of their diversification, little is known about evolutionary trajectories within lineages, the impacts of environmental drivers, or the scope and nature of now‐extinct diversity. Time‐structured palaeodata from geologically young fossil records, such as fossil counts and particularly ancient DNA (aDNA) data, would help fill this large knowledge gap. High ambient temperatures can be detrimental to the preservation of DNA, but refined methodology now allows data generation even from very poorly preserved samples. Here, we show for the first time that fish fossils from tropical lake sediments yield endogenous aDNA. Despite generally low …