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Journal ArticleDOI

Resolution of the early placental mammal radiation using Bayesian phylogenetics

TLDR
Crown-group Eutheria may have their most recent common ancestry in the Southern Hemisphere (Gondwana), and placental phylogeny is investigated using Bayesian and maximum-likelihood methods and a 16.4-kilobase molecular data set.
Abstract
Molecular phylogenetic studies have resolved placental mammals into four major groups, but have not established the full hierarchy of interordinal relationships, including the position of the root. The latter is critical for understanding the early biogeographic history of placentals. We investigated placental phylogeny using Bayesian and maximum-likelihood methods and a 16.4-kilobase molecular data set. Interordinal relationships are almost entirely resolved. The basal split is between Afrotheria and other placentals, at about 103 million years, and may be accounted for by the separation of South America and Africa in the Cretaceous. Crown-group Eutheria may have their most recent common ancestry in the Southern Hemisphere (Gondwana).

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The kangaroo genome. Leaps and bounds in comparative genomics.

TL;DR: The contributions from cytogenetic and genetic studies of marsupials are summarized, the genomic resources currently available and those being developed are described, and the benefits of a kangaroo genome project are explored.
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Evaluating the Adequacy of Molecular Clock Models Using Posterior Predictive Simulations

TL;DR: Methods of investigating model adequacy should be routinely used in combination with traditional model selection in evolutionary studies, and whether a broader range of clock models to be considered in phylogenetic analysis is revealed.
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Developmental constraint on the evolution of marsupial forelimb morphology

TL;DR: The results strongly support the constraint hypothesis, and indicate that the highly significant differences between marsupial and placentalForelimb shape diversity has been strongly influenced by different rates of morphological evolution among the distal forelimb elements in these two important mammal lineages.
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Discovery of α-defensins in basal mammals

TL;DR: Using hidden Markov model (HMM) profile searching, the discovery of α -defensins are reported in the African savanna elephant, the lesser hedgehog tenrec, and the nine-banded armadillo genomes representing two of the most basal mammalian superorders, Afrotheria and Xenarthra.
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The Ancestral Eutherian Karyotype Is Present in Xenarthra

TL;DR: One of the species studied, the two-toed sloth C. hoffmanii (2n = 50), showed a chromosome complement strikingly similar to the proposed 2n = 48 ancestral Eutherian karyotype, strongly reinforcing it.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

MRBAYES: Bayesian inference of phylogenetic trees

TL;DR: The program MRBAYES performs Bayesian inference of phylogeny using a variant of Markov chain Monte Carlo, and an executable is available at http://brahms.rochester.edu/software.html.
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MODELTEST: testing the model of DNA substitution.

TL;DR: The program MODELTEST uses log likelihood scores to establish the model of DNA evolution that best fits the data.
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An Empirical Test of Bootstrapping as a Method for Assessing Confidence in Phylogenetic Analysis

TL;DR: This work uses computer simulations and a laboratory-generated phylogeny to test bootstrapping results of parsimony analyses, and indicates that any given bootstrap proportion provides an unbiased but highly imprecise measure of repeatability, unless the actual probability of replicating the relevant result is nearly one.
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A molecular timescale for vertebrate evolution

TL;DR: The clock-like accumulation of sequence differences in some genes provides an alternative method by which the mean divergence time can be estimated, and the molecular times agree with most early and late fossil-based times, but indicate major gaps in the Mesozoic fossil record.
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Markov Chasin Monte Carlo Algorithms for the Bayesian Analysis of Phylogenetic Trees

TL;DR: The Bayesian framework for analyzing aligned nucleotide sequence data to reconstruct phylogenies, assess uncertainty in the reconstructions, and perform other statistical inferences is developed and a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler is employed to sample trees and model parameter values from their joint posterior distribution.
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