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Endemic African mammals shake the phylogenetic tree

Nature volume 388, pages 61–64 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

The order Insectivora, including living taxa (lipotyphlans) and archaic fossil forms, is central to the question of higher-level relationships among placental mammals1. Beginning with Huxley2, it has been argued that insectivores retain many primitive features and are closer to the ancestral stock of mammals than are other living groups3. Nevertheless, cladistic analysis suggests that living insectivores, at least, are united by derived anatomical features4. Here we analyse DNA sequences from three mitochondrial genes and two nuclear genes to examine relationships of insectivores to other mammals. The representative insectivores are not monophyletic in any of our analyses. Rather, golden moles are included in a clade that contains hyraxes, manatees, elephants, elephant shrews and aardvarks. Members of this group are of presumed African origin5,6. This implies that there was an extensive African radiation from a single common ancestor that gave rise to ecologically divergent adaptive types. 12S ribosomal RNA transversions suggest that the base of this radiation occurred during Africa's window of isolation in the Cretaceous period before land connections were developed with Europe in the early Cenozoic era.

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Figure 1: Majority-rule parsimony bootstrap trees based on mitochondrial (a), vWF (b), and A2AB (c) sequences.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the European Commission, the NSF, the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Society. We thank D. Willemsen for technical assistance, D. Swofford for permission to use PAUP 4.0d52-54, and F. Catzeflis, E. Harley, J. Kirsch, G. Olbricht, J. Wensing and the Noorder Zoo for tissue samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. *Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, 92521, California, USA

    Mark S. Springer, Gregory C. Cleven & Heather M. Amrine

  2. †Department of Biochemistry, University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Ole Madsen & Wilfried W. de Jong

  3. ‡Institute for Systematics and Population Biology, University of Amsterdam, PO Box 94766, 1090GT Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wilfried W. de Jong

  4. §Biology and Biochemistry, Queen's University, 97 Lisburn Road, Belfast, BT9 07BL, UK

    Victor G. Waddell & Michael J. Stanhope

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  1. Mark S. Springer
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Correspondence to Mark S. Springer.

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Springer, M., Cleven, G., Madsen, O. et al. Endemic African mammals shake the phylogenetic tree. Nature 388, 61–64 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/40386

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