ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Improvements in the fossil record may largely resolve current conflicts between morphological and molecular estimates of mammal phylogeny.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- The present does not reflect the past: geographic mismatches between fossil and modern records are widespread across the tree of life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Fossil record biases skew inferences of mammal trait evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A large therian mammal from the Late Cretaceous of South America.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Multiple modes of inference reveal less phylogenetic signal in marsupial basicranial shape compared with the rest of the cranium.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The molecular evolution of genes previously associated with large sizes reveals possible pathways to cetacean gigantism.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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- Mammalian dental diversity: an evolutionary template for regenerative dentistry.Frontiers in dental medicine · 2023Review
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- Phylogenetic Signal and Bias in Paleontology.Systematic biology · 2022Article
- Molecular phylogenies map to biogeography better than morphological ones.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Paleozoic origins of cheilostome bryozoans and their parental care inferred by a new genome-skimmed phylogeny.Science advances · 2022Article
- Champagne: Automated Whole-Genome Phylogenomic Character Matrix Method Using Large Genomic Indels for Homoplasy-Free Inference.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- An evolutionarily conserved mechanism that amplifies the effect of deleterious mutations in osteosarcoma.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2022Article
- P*R*O*P: a web application to perform phylogenetic analysis considering the effect of gaps.BMC bioinformatics · 2021Article
- Article
- Inferring the mammal tree: Species-level sets of phylogenies for questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Congruence, fossils and the evolutionary tree of rodents and lagomorphs.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Phylogenies of mammals based on morphological data continue to show several major areas of conflict with the current consensus view of their relationships, which is based largely on molecular data. This raises doubts as to whether current morphological character sets are able to accurately resolve mammal relationships. We tested this under a hypothetical 'best case scenario' by using ancestral state reconstruction (under both maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood) to infer the morphologies of fossil ancestors for all clades present in a recent comprehensive DNA sequence-based phylogeny of mammals, and then seeing what effect the subsequent inclusion of these predicted ancestors had on unconstrained phylogenetic analyses of morphological data. We found that this resulted in topologies that are highly congruent with the current consensus phylogeny, at least when the predicted ancestors are assumed to be well preserved and densely sampled. Most strikingly, several analyses recovered the monophyly of clades that have never been found in previous morphology-only studies, such as Afrotheria and Laurasiatheria. Our results suggest that, at least in principle, improvements in the fossil record-specifically the discovery of fossil taxa that preserve the ancestral or near-ancestral morphologies of the nodes in the current consensus-may be sufficient to largely reconcile morphological and molecular estimates of mammal phylogeny, even using current morphological character sets.
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