Disentangling the Relationship of the Australian Marsupial Orders Using Retrotransposon and Evolutionary Network Analyses

The ancestors to the Australian marsupials entered Australia around 60 (54–72) Ma from Antarctica, and radiated into the four living orders Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia, Diprotodontia, and Notoryctemorphia. The relationship between the four Australian marsupial orders has been a long-standing question, because different phylogenetic studies have not been able to consistently reconstruct the same topology. Initial in silico analysis of the Tasmanian devil genome and experimental screening in the seven marsupial orders revealed 20 informative transposable element insertions for resolving the inter- and intraordinal relationships of Australian and South American orders. However, the retrotransposon insertions support three conflicting topologies regarding Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia, and Notoryctemorphia, indicating that the split between the three orders may be best understood as a network. This finding is supported by a phylogenetic reanalysis of nuclear gene sequences, using a consensus network approach that allows depicting hidden phylogenetic conflict, otherwise lost when forcing the data into a bifurcating tree. The consensus network analysis agrees with the transposable element analysis in that all possible topologies regarding Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia, and Notoryctemorphia in a rooted four-taxon topology are equally well supported. In addition, retrotransposon insertion data support the South American order Didelphimorphia being the sistergroup to all other living marsupial orders. The four Australian orders originated within 3 Myr at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. The rapid divergences left conflicting phylogenetic information in the genome possibly generated by incomplete lineage sorting or introgressive hybridization, leaving the relationship among Australian marsupial orders unresolvable as a bifurcating process millions of years later.