A new phylogeny of the mammals

[muriel_volestrangler]

Well, there may not be much that's new in this, rather than confirming previous assumptions, but there may be some points of interest.

A paper in this week’s Science uses a lot of data to construct the most complete phylogeny yet of mammalian families. Meredith et al. used 26 genes to not only construct the tree, but estimate divergence times. Their sample comprises 97%-99% of the roughly 150 described mammalian families. Here’s the tree they get (click to enlarge; lots of detail can be seen by zooming as well):
...

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/a-new-phylogeny-of-the-mammals/

I'll let you go to the WEIT blog for the picture - it's pretty big when you enlarge it enough to be able to read it. The few non-intuitive things that Coyne points out include that rodents are more closely related to primates than to bats; elephants are more closely related to anteaters than, say, to rhinos; the red panda and giant panda are not at all closely related; and that (and this was the main point of the paper) that the major orders diverged after the Cretaceous, which has been suspected, but this gene analysis now confirms it.

[Recursion]

1. I wonder where Allotheria would have stood in that tree?

As cool as genetic cladistics are, it can raise more questions than it answers with extinct clades.

[Odin2005]

4. what I've read says that they are the most basal major branch of true mammals.

We now know that the Monotremes are actually very high up on the mammal tree, thanks to a fossil jaw from a Australian proto-monotreme that has 5-pointed molars fairly similar to the molars of the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals.

[thereismore]

2. How come man is not on top. We were created to rule the rest.

:sarcasm:

[Odin2005]

3. Wow, bats are traditionally thought to be close to the Primates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archonta

And whales' closest land-lubber relative is the HIPPO? LMAO!!!