Phylogeny and heterochronic changes of extant and extinct lynxes

BOSCAINI, ALBERTO; MADURELL-MALAPEIRA, JOAN

Trento

Congreso; XXXIII Congress of the Willi Hennig Society; 2014

MUSE: Museo delle Scienze di Trento

Fossil remains ascribable to the genus Lynx are quite common in the Plio-Pleistocene sites of the northern hemisphere, above all in Europe and eastern Asia, being a quite ubiquitous presence in the faunal lists of the related deposits. However many aspects of their evolutionary history remain unclear, starting from their own ingroup phylogeny. This is ascribable to many causes, proposed in the past by many authors as: the scarcity of well preserved fossils, the recent and quick divergence of the extant lineages (that impedes well-defined molecular studies), their extreme adaptability and "plasticity" of their body size, difficulties in defining reliable morphological diagnostic features (and observable in the fossil record) and dubious taxonomic attributions. In recent times a special attention has been directed on this group of felids, in the effort of clarifying these obscure points, and in the last decade many studies on extant and fossil lynxes have been conducted on south-western European material. New findings ascribable to the species Lynx pardinus, attest the presence of this species in the Iberian Peninsula at 1.5 Ma, pushing back its origins in the late Early Pleistocene, and opened the way to a phylogenetic study based on morphological characters where particular attention has been paid to the heterochronic changes, as a key to understand the branch splitting events. Even if the long-lived Lynx issiodorensis remains the pivotal point in the evolution of the whole genus, Lynx pardinus appeared to be more related with the first small-sized forms of Lynx issiodorensis, and Lynx spelaeus not to be engaged in the evolutionary lineage of the iberian lynx. Cladistics combined with the study of the heterochronic (neotenic) changes casts new light on the genus Lynx´s phylogeny.