The DOI matches its Crossref record; 86 of the 87 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Ancestral State Reconstruction of Body Size in the Caniformia (Carnivora, Mammalia): The Effects of Incorporating Data from the Fossil Record
Abstract
A recent molecular phylogeny of the mammalian order Carnivora implied large body size as the ancestral condition for the caniform subclade Arctoidea using the distribution of species mean body sizes among living taxa. "Extant taxa-only" approaches such as these discount character state observations for fossil members of living clades and completely ignore data from extinct lineages. To more rigorously reconstruct body sizes of ancestral forms within the Caniformia, body size and first appearance data were collected for 149 extant and 367 extinct taxa. Body sizes were reconstructed for four ancestral nodes using weighted squared-change parsimony on log-transformed body mass data. Reconstructions based on extant taxa alone favored large body sizes (on the order of 10 to 50 kg) for the last common ancestors of both the Caniformia and Arctoidea. In contrast, reconstructions incorporating fossil data support small body sizes (< 5 kg) for the ancestors of those clades. When the temporal information associated with fossil data was discarded, body size reconstructions became ambiguous, demonstrating that incorporating both character state and temporal information from fossil taxa unambiguously supports a small ancestral body size, thereby falsifying hypotheses derived from extant taxa alone. Body size reconstructions for Caniformia, Arctoidea, and Musteloidea were not sensitive to potential errors introduced by uncertainty in the position of extinct lineages relative to the molecular…
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“Including data from extinct taxa may improve such analyses (Finarelli and Flynn 2006;Montgomery et al. 2010;Slater et al. 2012).”
From THE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF CETACEAN BRAIN AND BODY SIZE: CETACEAN BRAIN EVOLUTION (2013) · cites this paper as Finarelli and Flynn 2006
Citations
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Upham, N. S., Esselstyn, J. A., & Jetz, W. (2019) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000494 · Cited by 1,235
Campione, N. E., & Evans, D. C. (2012) · BMC Biology · doi:10.1186/1741-7007-10-60 · Cited by 475
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“The accuracy of this reconstruction will be greatly improved by incorporation of data from extinct species (38), whether through discoveries of fossils that are well preserved in 3D or retrodeformation of existing fossils of both early crown and stem birds.”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Finarelli, J. A., & Flynn, J. J.
- Affiliations
- Field Museum of Natural History (US)
- American Museum of Natural History (US)
- Corresponding author
- Finarelli, John A.
- ORCID
- Flynn, John J.
- Venue
- Systematic Biology
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2006-04-01
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 301-313
- ISSN
- 1063-5157 (ISSN-L)
- 1076-836X
- OpenAlex
- W2104579758
- Cited by
- 254
- References
- 87
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 19 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 15 · 2012: 15
- FWCI
- 7.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Systematic Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Morphological variations and asymmetry
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Plant Diversity and Evolution
- Keywords
- ancestral state reconstruction, body size, Caniformia, Arctoidea, Carnivora, fossil record, temporal information, body mass evolution, pinnipeds, character evolution, molecular phylogeny
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Carnivora, Biological Evolution, Fossils, Body Size
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