An early Oligocene fossil demonstrates treeshrews are slowly evolving "living fossils"

Scientific Reports
Qiang Li, Xijun Ni

Abstract

Treeshrews are widely considered a "living model" of an ancestral primate, and have long been called "living fossils". Actual fossils of treeshrews, however, are extremely rare. We report a new fossil species of Ptilocercus treeshrew recovered from the early Oligocene (~34 Ma) of China that represents the oldest definitive fossil record of the crown group of treeshrews and nearly doubles the temporal length of their fossil record. The fossil species is strikingly similar to the living Ptilocercus lowii, a species generally recognized as the most plesiomorphic extant treeshrew. It demonstrates that Ptilocercus treeshrews have undergone little evolutionary change in their morphology since the early Oligocene. Morphological comparisons and phylogenetic analysis support the long-standing idea that Ptilocercus treeshrews are morphologically conservative and have probably retained many characters present in the common stock that gave rise to archontans, which include primates, flying lemurs, plesiadapiforms and treeshrews. This discovery provides an exceptional example of slow morphological evolution in a mammalian group over a period of 34 million years. The persistent and stable tropical environment in Southeast Asia through the Ce...Continue Reading

References

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Citations

Jan 8, 2016·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Amanda D MelinNathaniel J Dominy
Sep 15, 2016·Brain Structure & Function·Jian-Kun DaiHao Lei
Sep 24, 2016·Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution·Mark S SpringerWilliam J Murphy
Dec 15, 2017·The Journal of Comparative Neurology·Elizabeth N JohnsonGreg D Field
Feb 28, 2019·The Anatomical Record : Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology·Keegan R SeligMary T Silcox
Jun 12, 2019·Royal Society Open Science·Gwen DuytschaeverAmanda D Melin
Jul 6, 2021·Conservation Biology : the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology·Kang HuangRuliang Pan
Dec 28, 2021·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Jon H KaasIwona Stepniewska

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Software Mentioned

Mesquite
MorphoBank
TNT
ACCTRAN
PAUP
NEXUS
Tree analysis

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