ArticleScientific reports2016
An early Oligocene fossil demonstrates treeshrews are slowly evolving "living fossils".
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mitogenomic Insights Into the Population Structure and Demographic History of Tree Shrews (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- APGW/AKH Precursor from Rotifer Brachionus plicatilis and the DNA Loss Model Explain Evolutionary Trends of the Neuropeptide LWamide, APGWamide, RPCH, AKH, ACP, CRZ, and GnRH Families.Journal of molecular evolution · 2023Article
- The Complete Mitochondrial Genome ofGenes · 2023Article
- Escaping the nocturnal bottleneck, and the evolution of the dorsal and ventral streams of visual processing in primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Complete mitogenome of the endangered and endemic Nicobar treeshrew (Tupaia nicobarica) and comparison with other Scandentians.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Taxon incompleteness and discrete time bins affect character change rates in simulated data.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Opsin genes of select treeshrews resolve ancestral character states within Scandentia.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Article
- Distribution and diversity of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in tree shrew.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2019Article
- Chitinase genes (Science advances · 2018Article
- Euarchontan Opsin Variation Brings New Focus to Primate Origins.Molecular biology and evolution · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Treeshrews are widely considered a "living model" of an ancestral primate, and have long been called "living fossils". Actual fossils of treeshrews, however, are extremely rare. We report a new fossil species of Ptilocercus treeshrew recovered from the early Oligocene (~34 Ma) of China that represents the oldest definitive fossil record of the crown group of treeshrews and nearly doubles the temporal length of their fossil record. The fossil species is strikingly similar to the living Ptilocercus lowii, a species generally recognized as the most plesiomorphic extant treeshrew. It demonstrates that Ptilocercus treeshrews have undergone little evolutionary change in their morphology since the early Oligocene. Morphological comparisons and phylogenetic analysis support the long-standing idea that Ptilocercus treeshrews are morphologically conservative and have probably retained many characters present in the common stock that gave rise to archontans, which include primates, flying lemurs, plesiadapiforms and treeshrews. This discovery provides an exceptional example of slow morphological evolution in a mammalian group over a period of 34 million years. The persistent and stable tropical environment in Southeast Asia through the Cenozoic likely played a critical role in the survival of such a morphologically conservative lineage.
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