Abstract
Although the use of landmark data to study
shape changes along a phylogenetic tree has become a common practice in
evolutionary
studies, the role of this sort of data for the
inference of phylogenetic relationships remains under debate.
Theoretical issues
aside, the very existence of historical information
in landmark data has been challenged, since phylogenetic analyses have
often shown little congruence with alternative
sources of evidence. However, most analyses conducted in the past were
based
upon a single landmark configuration, leaving it
unsettled whether the incorporation of multiple configurations may
improve
the rather poor performance of this data source in
most previous phylogenetic analyses. In the present study, we present a
phylogenetic analysis of landmark data that
combines information derived from several skeletal structures to derive a
phylogenetic
tree for musteloids. The analysis includes nine
configurations representing different skeletal structures for 24
species.
The resulting tree presents several notable
concordances with phylogenetic hypotheses derived from molecular data.
In particular,
Mephitidae, Procyonidae, and Lutrinae plus the
genera Martes, Mustela, Galictis, and Procyon
were retrieved as monophyletic. In addition, other groupings were in
agreement with molecular phylogenies or presented only
minor discordances. Complementary analyses have
also indicated that the results improve substantially when an increasing
number
of landmark configurations are included in the
analysis. The results presented here thus highlight the importance of
combining
information from multiple structures to derive
phylogenetic hypotheses from landmark data.
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