Primate Origins & Classification

Hi, Card-carrying Mammalogists. Is this reference as about as good as it gets for primate genealogy & systematics?

Abstract Phylogenetic relationships, divergence times, and patterns of biogeographic descent among primate species are both complex and contentious. Here, we generate a robust molecular phylogeny for 70 primate genera and 367 primate species based on a concatenation of 69 nuclear gene segments and ten mitochondrial gene sequences, most of which were extracted from GenBank. Relaxed clock analyses of divergence times with 14 fossil-calibrated nodes suggest that living Primates last shared a common ancestor 71–63 Ma, and that divergences within both Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini are entirely post-Cretaceous. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs played an important role in the diversification of placental mammals. Previous queries into primate historical biogeography have suggested Africa, Asia, Europe, or North America as the ancestral area of crown primates, but were based on methods that were coopted from phylogeny reconstruction. By contrast, we analyzed our molecular phylogeny with two methods that were developed explicitly for ancestral area reconstruction, and find support for the hypothesis that the most recent common ancestor of living Primates resided in Asia. Analyses of primate macroevolutionary dynamics provide support for a diversification rate increase in the late Miocene, possibly in response to elevated global mean temperatures, and are consistent with the fossil record. By contrast, diversification analyses failed to detect evidence for rate-shift changes near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary even though the fossil record provides clear evidence for a major turnover event (‘‘Grande Coupure’’) at this time. Our results highlight the power and limitations of inferring diversification dynamics from molecular phylogenies, as well as the sensitivity of diversification analyses to different species concepts.

Citation: Springer MS, Meredith RW, Gatesy J, Emerling CA, Park J, et al. (2012) Macroevolutionary Dynamics and Historical Biogeography of Primate Diversification Inferred from a Species Supermatrix. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49521. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049521 Editor: Roscoe Stanyon, University of Florence, Italy Received May 17, 2012; Accepted October 9, 2012; Published November 16, 2012 Copyright: ß 2012 Springer et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by NSF (EF0629860 to MSS and JG; EF0629849 to WJM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: mark.springer@ucr.edu (MS); wmurphy@cvm.tamu.edu (WJM)