A phylogenetic study of living and fossil platyrrhines. American Museum novitates ; no. 3269

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Date

1999

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

New York, NY : American Museum of Natural History

DOI

DOI

Abstract

"A phylogenetic analysis of the 16 genera of living platyrrhines (New World monkeys) and 20 fossil taxa of the same group was undertaken. Analyses were conducted on two data sets: one was restricted to morphological characters and the other was a combination of those morphological characters and DNA sequence characters belonging to the 16S and 12S mito-chondrial genes and the e-globin and IRBP nuclear genes. In neither case could all taxa be included without large loss in resolution when the strict consensus trees were computed: the maximum number of fossil taxa that could be included was 11 with the first data set, and 18 with the second; relationships differed between the two. In the simultaneous analysis of mor-phological and molecular data, relationships among Recent taxa remained invariant regardless of what fossil taxa were included. This allowed a comparison of character changes along branches between a tree including Recent taxa only and a tree including the fossil species and to evaluate the influence that the addition of fossils has on our understanding of character evolution. When fossils were added, branch support values decreased substantially (i.e., for callitrichines and pitheciins) with the following contributing factors: (1) characters were not as clustered in some nodes as in the phylogeny of Recent taxa only but scattered among a larger number of nodes; (2) high numbers of fossils had missing entries, which contributed to their being ubiquitous and accommodating in many topologies; and (3) adding taxa increased the degree of homoplasy and in some cases caused a higher instability for some clades. It is apparent that a high Bremer value may be the result of extinctions and taxonomic incomplete-ness, rather than correspondence to reality"--P. [1].

Description

40 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 28-33).

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