A genomic timescale for placental mammal evolution. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The precise pattern and timing of speciation events that gave rise to all living placental mammals remain controversial. We provide a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of genetic variation across an alignment of 241 placental mammal genome assemblies, addressing prior concerns regarding limited genomic sampling across species. We compared neutral genome-wide phylogenomic signals using concatenation and coalescent-based approaches, interrogated phylogenetic variation across chromosomes, and analyzed extensive catalogs of structural variants. Interordinal relationships exhibit relatively low rates of phylogenomic conflict across diverse datasets and analytical methods. Conversely, X-chromosome versus autosome conflicts characterize multiple independent clades that radiated during the Cenozoic. Genomic time trees reveal an accumulation of cladogenic events before and immediately after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, implying important roles for Cretaceous continental vicariance and the K-Pg extinction in the placental radiation.

published proceedings

  • Science

altmetric score

  • 795.404

author list (cited authors)

  • Foley, N. M., Mason, V. C., Harris, A. J., Bredemeyer, K. R., Damas, J., Lewin, H. A., ... Murphy, W. J.

citation count

  • 13

complete list of authors

  • Foley, Nicole M||Mason, Victor C||Harris, Andrew J||Bredemeyer, Kevin R||Damas, Joana||Lewin, Harris A||Eizirik, Eduardo||Gatesy, John||Karlsson, Elinor K||Lindblad-Toh, Kerstin||Springer, Mark S||Murphy, William J

publication date

  • April 2023