Evolutionary History of the Nesophontidae, the Last Unplaced Recent Mammal Family.
The mammalian evolutionary tree has lost several major clades through recent human-caused extinctions. This process of historical biodiversity loss has particularly affected tropical island regions such as the Caribbean, an area of great evolutionary diversification but poor molecular preservation. The most enigmatic of the recently extinct endemic Caribbean mammals are the Nesophontidae, a family of morphologically plesiomorphic lipotyphlan insectivores with no consensus on their evolutionary affinities, and which constitute the only major recent mammal clade to lack any molecular information on their phylogenetic placement. Here, we use a palaeogenomic approach to place Nesophontidae within the phylogeny of recent Lipotyphla. We recovered the near-complete mitochondrial genome and sequences for 17 nuclear genes from a ∼750-year-old Hispaniolan Nesophontes specimen, and identify a divergence from their closest living relatives, the Solenodontidae, more than 40 million years ago. Nesophontidae is thus an older distinct lineage than many extant mammalian orders, highlighting not only the role of island systems as "museums" of diversity that preserve ancient lineages, but also the major human-caused loss of evolutionary history.
Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom.
Selina
S
Brace
University of York, York, United Kingdom.
Jessica A
JA
Thomas
Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden.
Love
L
Dalén
Institute of Anthropology Johannes Gutenberg-University, Anselm-Franz-von-Bentzel-Weg 7, Mainz, Germany.
Joachim
J
Burger
Department of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY.
Ross D E
RD
MacPhee
Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom i.barnes@nhm.ac.uk.
Ian
I
Barnes
Zoological Society of London, Institute of Zoology, London, United Kingdom.
Samuel T
ST
Turvey
D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D005075:Biological Evolution; D000072441:DNA, Ancient / Q000032:analysis; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000235:genetics; D007312:Eulipotyphla / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D054629:Genome, Mitochondrial; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods*; D014900:West Indies
D000072441:DNA, Ancient; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial
Ancient DNA; Cenozoic; insectivore; systematics; tropics.