species from Southern Europe after the end of the ice age (Álvarez-Lao & García, 2010). Overall, the modifications led to a change from a total of 1,983,482 occurrences to 2,212,446 occurrences in 110 × 110 km cells (1,073,129 to 1,298,365 occurrences for non-marine mammals and 67,306 to 242,960 occurrences for megafauna). A detailed explanation of the different types of modifications can be found in supplementary methods. (B) Estimated diversity All diversities were estimated on a Behrman projection of the world with equally sized grid cells with 360 columns (i.e., 1° by 1° cells at the equator, roughly equal to 110 × 110 km grid cells). Diversities were estimated for five mammalian subgroups: 1) all species, 2) non-marine species, 3) terrestrial species, 4) large terrestrial species, and 5) terrestrial megafauna. For non-marine species, species coded as exclusively marine by IUCN (most cetaceans and two manatees), as well as pinnipeds coded as “marine and terrestrial” and three effectively marine non-pinniped carnivores (Ursus maritimus (polar bear), Enhydra lutris (sea otter) and Lontra felina (marine otter)), were removed, whereas species coded as “freshwater and marine”, such as Phoca vitulina (harbor seal) or manatees of the genus Trichechus, were deleted from all fully or partially marine cells. For terrestrial species all manatees, cetaceans, pinnipeds, and bats were removed from non-marine species, and this list was further restricted in large terrestrial species to only
relatively low historic losses in North and South America may reflect that the massive prehistoric loss already had removed most sensitive species. Conversely, the lower prehistoric loss in South-East Asia and potential survival of relatively sensitive species could explain its large historic losses and higher fraction of threatened species compared to America (Sodhi et al., 2010). Our results would thus be analogous to geographic patterns of threatened and extinct species discussed for birds under the framework on extinction filters by Balmford (1996). Since we are only analyzing known species, we may underestimate of the diversity loss in poorly sampled places. We note, however, that a recent detailed study from India (which is one of the least sampled areas in tropical Asia) did not recover a single extinct species in their sampling from five time periods spanning the last 200,000 years (Roberts et al. 2014). The small tropical Asian megafauna extinction is therefore very likely to be real although a few additional extinct species may be recovered with additional sampling. We are much more skeptical about tropical Australia where we suspect that the lack of megafauna in the Natural diversities could be a sampling artefact. The patterns in phylogenetic diversity deficits are similar to those for species diversity, although generally smaller (Fig. 2). This is most striking in Australia, which appears to have suffered substantially lower phylogenetic losses relative to its species losses. A potential reason may be that marsupials appear to have a higher evolutionary ecological plasticity than placental mammals, so that phylogenetic clades are less ecologically specialized and thus less consistently sensitive to the same pressures. Exemplifying this,
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