Improvements in the fossil record may largely resolve current conflicts between morphological and molecular estimates of mammal phylogeny.

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 th

SUBMITTER: Beck RMD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6304057 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature