ArticleeLife2018
Oldest skeleton of a fossil flying squirrel casts new light on the phylogeny of the group.
Article in eLife, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Insights into adaptive evolution in different locomotor modes and phylogeny of Sciuridae from mitogenomes of flying and tree squirrels.PloS one · 2026Article
- Pliocene Forest Fragmentation Shaped Speciation in Tropical Asia's Giant Squirrels (Ratufa).Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Mitogenome of Endemic Species of Flying Squirrel,Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Eco-Spatial Modeling of Two Giant Flying Squirrels (Sciuridae:Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Inferring the locomotor ecology of two of the oldest fossil squirrels: influence of operationalization, trait, body size and machine learning method.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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- Their fates intertwined: diversification patterns of the Asian gliding vertebrates may have been forged by dipterocarp trees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Convergent deployment of ancestral functions during the evolution of mammalian flight membranes.Science advances · 2023Article
- Phylogenomic analyses highlight innovation and introgression in the continental radiations of Fagaceae across the Northern Hemisphere.Nature communications · 2022Article
- 5S-IGS rDNA in wind-pollinated trees (Fagus L.) encapsulates 55 million years of reticulate evolution and hybrid origins of modern species.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic and morphological significance of an overlooked flying squirrel (Pteromyini, Rodentia) from the eastern Himalayas with the description of a new genus.Zoological research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Flying squirrels are the only group of gliding mammals with a remarkable diversity and wide geographical range. However, their evolutionary story is not well known. Thus far, identification of extinct flying squirrels has been exclusively based on dental features, which, contrary to certain postcranial characters, are not unique to them. Therefore, fossils attributed to this clade may indeed belong to other squirrel groups. Here we report the oldest fossil skeleton of a flying squirrel (11.6 Ma) that displays the gliding-related diagnostic features shared by extant forms and allows for a recalibration of the divergence time between tree and flying squirrels. Our phylogenetic analyses combining morphological and molecular data generally support older dates than previous molecular estimates (~23 Ma), being congruent with the inclusion of some of the earliest fossils (~36 Ma) into this clade. They also show that flying squirrels experienced little morphological change for almost 12 million years.
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