A mitogenomic timetree for Darwin’s enigmatic South American mammal Macrauchenia patachonica

Westbury, M, Baleka, S, Barlow, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5532-9458, Hartmann, S, Paijmans, JLA, Kramarz, A, Forasiepi, AM, Bond, M, Gelfo, JN, Reguero, MA, López-Mendoza, P, Taglioretti, M, Scaglia, F, Rinderknecht, A, Jones, W, Mena, F, Billet, G, de Muizon, C, Aguilar, JL, MacPhee, RDE and Hofreiter, M, 2017. A mitogenomic timetree for Darwin’s enigmatic South American mammal Macrauchenia patachonica. Nature Communications, 8: 15951. ISSN 2041-1723

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Abstract

The unusual mix of morphological traits displayed by extinct South American native ungulates (SANUs) confounded both Charles Darwin, who first discovered them, and Richard Owen, who tried to resolve their relationships. Here we report an almost complete mitochondrial genome for the litoptern Macrauchenia. Our dated phylogenetic tree places Macrauchenia as sister to Perissodactyla, but close to the radiation of major lineages within Laurasiatheria. This position is consistent with a divergence estimate of B66 Ma (95% credibility interval, 56.64–77.83 Ma) obtained for the split between Macrauchenia and other Panperissodactyla. Combined with their morphological distinctiveness, this evidence supports the positioning of Litopterna (possibly in company with other SANU groups) as a separate order within Laurasiatheria. We also show that, when using strict criteria, extinct taxa marked by deep divergence times and a lack of close living relatives may still be amenable to palaeogenomic analysis through iterative mapping against more distant relatives.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Nature Communications
Creators:	Westbury, M., Baleka, S., Barlow, A., Hartmann, S., Paijmans, J.L.A., Kramarz, A., Forasiepi, A.M., Bond, M., Gelfo, J.N., Reguero, M.A., López-Mendoza, P., Taglioretti, M., Scaglia, F., Rinderknecht, A., Jones, W., Mena, F., Billet, G., de Muizon, C., Aguilar, J.L., MacPhee, R.D.E. and Hofreiter, M.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	27 June 2017
Volume:	8
ISSN:	2041-1723
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/ncomms15951 DOI 1233259 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2017. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	13 Nov 2019 14:01
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2019 14:01
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/38248

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