Charting the Course of Pinniped Evolution: insights from molecular phylogeny and fossil record integration
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2024-04-19
Submitted Date
2023-08-23
Subject Terms
pinnipedia
metatree
biogeography
BioGeoBEARS
diversification
fossilBAMM
metatree
biogeography
BioGeoBEARS
diversification
fossilBAMM
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Abstract
Abstract
Pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, walruses, and their fossil relatives) are one of the most successful mammalian clades to live in the oceans. Despite a well-resolved molecular phylogeny and a global fossil record, a complete understanding of their macroevolutionary dynamics remains hampered by a lack of formal analyses that combine these two rich sources of information. We used a meta-analytic approach to infer the most densely sampled pinniped phylogeny to-date (36 recent and 93 fossil taxa) and used phylogenetic paleobiological methods to study their diversification dynamics and biogeographic history. Pinnipeds mostly diversified at constant rates. Walruses however experienced rapid turnover in which extinction rates ultimately exceeded speciation rates from 12-6 Ma, possibly due to changing sea-levels and/or competition with otariids (eared seals). Historical biogeographic analyses including fossil data allowed us to confidently identify the North Pacific and the North Atlantic (plus or minus Paratethys) as the ancestral ranges of Otarioidea (eared seals + walrus) and crown phocids (earless seals), respectively. Yet, despite the novel addition of stem pan-pinniped taxa, the region of origin for Pan-Pinnipedia remained ambiguous. These results suggest further avenues of study in pinnipeds and provide a framework for investigating other groups with substantial extinct and extant diversity.
Citation
Travis Park, Gustavo Burin, Daniela Lazo-Cancino, Joseph P G Rees, James P Rule, Graham J Slater, Natalie Cooper, Charting the course of pinniped evolution: insights from molecular phylogeny and fossil record integration, Evolution, 2024;, qpae061, https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpae061
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. The linked document is the published version of the article.
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0014-3820
EISSN
1558-5646