ArticleEvolution & development
Toward consilience in reptile phylogeny: miRNAs support an archosaur, not lepidosaur, affinity for turtles.
Article in Evolution & development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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46 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Improving Orthologous Signal and Model Fit in Datasets Addressing the Root of the Animal Phylogeny.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Comparative transcriptome and miRNA analysis of skin pigmentation during embryonic development of Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis).BMC genomics · 2022Article
- Avian cardiomyocyte architecture and what it reveals about the evolution of the vertebrate heart.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Cranial ecomorphology of turtles and neck retraction as a possible trigger of ecological diversification.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Common evolutionary origin of acoustic communication in choanate vertebrates.Nature communications · 2022Article
- MirGeneDB 2.1: toward a complete sampling of all major animal phyla.Nucleic acids research · 2022Article
- The quest for a generic bird target to detect the presence of bird in food products and considerations for paleoprotein analysis.PloS one · 2022Article
- A new model of forelimb ecomorphology for predicting the ancient habitats of fossil turtles.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- A comparative analysis of heart microRNAs in vertebrates brings novel insights into the evolution of genetic regulatory networks.BMC genomics · 2021Article
- evALLution: making basic evolution concepts accessible to people with visual impairment through a multisensory tree of life.Evolution · 2021Article
- Palaeophysiology of pH regulation in tetrapods.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- The phylogeny of early amniotes and the affinities of Parareptilia and Varanopidae.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding the phylogenetic position of crown turtles (Testudines) among amniotes has been a source of particular contention. Recent morphological analyses suggest that turtles are sister to all other reptiles, whereas the vast majority of gene sequence analyses support turtles as being inside Diapsida, and usually as sister to crown Archosauria (birds and crocodilians). Previously, a study using microRNAs (miRNAs) placed turtles inside diapsids, but as sister to lepidosaurs (lizards and Sphenodon) rather than archosaurs. Here, we test this hypothesis with an expanded miRNA presence/absence dataset, and employ more rigorous criteria for miRNA annotation. Significantly, we find no support for a turtle + lepidosaur sister-relationship; instead, we recover strong support for turtles sharing a more recent common ancestor with archosaurs. We further test this result by analyzing a super-alignment of precursor miRNA sequences for every miRNA inferred to have been present in the most recent common ancestor of tetrapods. This analysis yields a topology that is fully congruent with our presence/absence analysis; our results are therefore in accordance with most gene sequence studies, providing strong, consilient molecular evidence from diverse independent datasets regarding the phylogenetic position of turtles.
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