Ancestral State Reconstruction of Body Size in the Caniformia (Carnivora, Mammalia): The Effects of Incorporating Data from the Fossil Record

Authors: Finarelli, John¹; Flynn, John¹

Source: Systematic Biology, Volume 55, Number 2, April 2006 , pp. 301-313(13)

Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd

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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 (

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/10635150500541698

Affiliations: 1: Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York, 10024, USA

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