The phylogeny of desmostylians revisited: proposal of new clades based on robust phylogenetic hypotheses

BACKGROUND: Desmostylia is a clade of extinct aquatic mammals with no living members. Today, this clade is considered belonging to either Afrotheria or Perissodactyla. In the currently-accepted taxonomic scheme, Desmostylia includes two families, 10 to 12 genera, and 13–14 species. There have been relatively few phylogenetic analyses published on desmostylian interrelationship compared to other vertebrate taxa, and two main, alternative phylogenetic hypotheses have been proposed in previous studies. One major problem with those previous studies is that the numbers of characters and OTUs were small. METHODS: In this study, we analyzed the phylogenetic interrelationship of Desmostylia based on a new data matrix that includes larger numbers of characters and taxa than in any previous studies. The new data matrix was compiled mainly based on data matrices of previous studies and included three outgroups and 13 desmostylian ingroup taxa. Analyses were carried out using five kinds of parsimonious methods. RESULTS: Strict consensus trees of the most parsimonious topologies obtained in all analyses supported the monophyly of Desmostylidae and paraphyly of traditional Paleoparadoxiidae. Based on these results, we propose phylogenetic definitions of the clades Desmostylidae and Paleoparadoxiidae based on common ancestry.