THE MORE, THE BETTER: THE USE OF MULTIPLE LANDMARK CONFIGURATIONS TO SOLVE THE PHYLOGENETIC RELATIONSHIPS IN MUSTELOIDS

CATALANO, S.; ERCOLI, M.; FRANCISCO J. PREVOSTI

SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGY

OXFORD UNIV PRESS

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2015 vol. 64 p. 294 - 306

1063-5157

Although the use of landmark data to study shape changes along a phylogenetic tree has become a commonpractice in evolutionary studies, the role of this sort of data for the inference of phylogenetic relationships remains underdebate. Theoretical issues aside, the very existence of historical information in landmark data has been challenged, sincephylogenetic analyses have often shown little congruence with alternative sources of evidence. However, most analysesconducted in the past were based upon a single landmark configuration, leaving it unsettled whether the incorporationof multiple configurations may improve the rather poor performance of this data source in most previous phylogeneticanalyses. In the present study, we present a phylogenetic analysis of landmark data that combines information derivedfrom several skeletal structures to derive a phylogenetic tree for musteloids. The analysis includes nine configurationsrepresenting different skeletal structures for 24 species. The resulting tree presents several notable concordances withphylogenetic hypotheses derived from molecular data. In particular,Mephitidae, Procyonidae, and Lutrinae plus the generaMartes, Mustela, Galictis, and Procyon were retrieved as monophyletic. In addition, other groupings were in agreement withmolecular phylogenies or presented only minor discordances. Complementary analyses have also indicated that the resultsimprove substantially when an increasing number of landmark configurations are included in the analysis. The resultspresented here thus highlight the importance of combining information from multiple structures to derive phylogenetichypotheses from landmark data. [Landmark data, multiple configurations, Musteloidea, parsimony, phylogenetic analysis,shape characters.