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Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature

Mosasauroid squamates represented the apex predators within the Late Cretaceous marine and occasionally also freshwater ecosystems. Proper understanding of the origin of their ecological adaptations or paleobiogeographic dispersals requires adequate knowledge of their phylogeny. The studies assessin...

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Autores principales: Madzia, Daniel, Cau, Andrea
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5602675/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28929018
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3782
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author Madzia, Daniel
Cau, Andrea
author_facet Madzia, Daniel
Cau, Andrea
author_sort Madzia, Daniel
collection PubMed
description Mosasauroid squamates represented the apex predators within the Late Cretaceous marine and occasionally also freshwater ecosystems. Proper understanding of the origin of their ecological adaptations or paleobiogeographic dispersals requires adequate knowledge of their phylogeny. The studies assessing the position of mosasauroids on the squamate evolutionary tree and their origins have long given conflicting results. The phylogenetic relationships within Mosasauroidea, however, have experienced only little changes throughout the last decades. Considering the substantial improvements in the development of phylogenetic methodology that have undergone in recent years, resulting, among others, in numerous alterations in the phylogenetic hypotheses of other fossil amniotes, we test the robustness in our understanding of mosasauroid beginnings and their evolutionary history. We re-examined a data set that results from modifications assembled in the course of the last 20 years and performed multiple parsimony analyses and Bayesian tip-dating analysis. Following the inferred topologies and the ‘weak spots’ in the phylogeny of mosasauroids, we revise the nomenclature of the ‘traditionally’ recognized mosasauroid clades, to acknowledge the overall weakness among branches and the alternative topologies suggested previously, and discuss several factors that might have an impact on the differing phylogenetic hypotheses and their statistical support.
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spelling pubmed-56026752017-09-19 Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature Madzia, Daniel Cau, Andrea PeerJ Evolutionary Studies Mosasauroid squamates represented the apex predators within the Late Cretaceous marine and occasionally also freshwater ecosystems. Proper understanding of the origin of their ecological adaptations or paleobiogeographic dispersals requires adequate knowledge of their phylogeny. The studies assessing the position of mosasauroids on the squamate evolutionary tree and their origins have long given conflicting results. The phylogenetic relationships within Mosasauroidea, however, have experienced only little changes throughout the last decades. Considering the substantial improvements in the development of phylogenetic methodology that have undergone in recent years, resulting, among others, in numerous alterations in the phylogenetic hypotheses of other fossil amniotes, we test the robustness in our understanding of mosasauroid beginnings and their evolutionary history. We re-examined a data set that results from modifications assembled in the course of the last 20 years and performed multiple parsimony analyses and Bayesian tip-dating analysis. Following the inferred topologies and the ‘weak spots’ in the phylogeny of mosasauroids, we revise the nomenclature of the ‘traditionally’ recognized mosasauroid clades, to acknowledge the overall weakness among branches and the alternative topologies suggested previously, and discuss several factors that might have an impact on the differing phylogenetic hypotheses and their statistical support. PeerJ Inc. 2017-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5602675/ /pubmed/28929018 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3782 Text en ©2017 Madzia and Cau http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Evolutionary Studies
Madzia, Daniel
Cau, Andrea
Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title_full Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title_fullStr Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title_full_unstemmed Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title_short Inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
title_sort inferring ‘weak spots’ in phylogenetic trees: application to mosasauroid nomenclature
topic Evolutionary Studies
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5602675/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28929018
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3782
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