[mc_maurer]

I think this is much closer than the "they're a very good blank slate". There are plenty of exceptionally successful groups of organisms with far less diversity. The point is not how successful beetles are, it's how differentiated they are. Something about their ability to occupy niches that promote isolation and therefore speciation has to be involved.

[LordDragonfang]

The article mentioned that they diversified early due to the diversification of the first flowering plants, so re-radiating into each others' niches over the following hundred million years could certainly help that while keeping species distinct.

[heresie-dabord]

> The point is not how successful beetles are, it's how differentiated they are. Something about their ability to occupy niches that promote isolation and therefore speciation

It's also how differentiated (and isolated) the habitats themselves became over 100s of millions of years of climate change and plate tectonics.