Dataset Information

Testing for Deperet's Rule (Body Size Increase) in Mammals using Combined Extinct and Extant Data.

ABSTRACT: Whether or not evolutionary lineages in general show a tendency to increase in body size has often been discussed. This tendency has been dubbed "Cope's rule" but because Cope never hypothesized it, we suggest renaming it after Depéret, who formulated it clearly in 1907. Depéret's rule has traditionally been studied using fossil data, but more recently a number of studies have used present-day species. While several paleontological studies of Cenozoic placental mammals have found support for increasing body size, most studies of extant placentals have failed to detect such a trend. Here, we present a method to combine information from present-day species with fossil data in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework. We apply the method to body mass estimates of a large number of extant and extinct mammal species, and find strong support for Depéret's rule. The tendency for size increase appears to be driven not by evolution toward larger size in established species, but by processes related to the emergence of new species. Our analysis shows that complementary data from extant and extinct species can greatly improve inference of macroevolutionary processes.

SUBMITTER: Bokma F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4678255 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Testing for Depéret's Rule (Body Size Increase) in Mammals using Combined Extinct and Extant Data.

Bokma Folmer F Godinot Marc M Maridet Olivier O Ladevèze Sandrine S Costeur Loïc L Solé Floréal F Gheerbrant Emmanuel E Peigné Stéphane S Jacques Florian F Laurin Michel M

Systematic biology 20151027 1

Whether or not evolutionary lineages in general show a tendency to increase in body size has often been discussed. This tendency has been dubbed "Cope's rule" but because Cope never hypothesized it, we suggest renaming it after Depéret, who formulated it clearly in 1907. Depéret's rule has traditionally been studied using fossil data, but more recently a number of studies have used present-day species. While several paleontological studies of Cenozoic placental mammals have found support for inc ...[more]

PMID: 26508768

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Project description:Independent molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses have often produced discordant results for certain groups which, for fossil-rich groups, raises the possibility that morphological data might mislead in those groups for which we depend upon morphology the most. Rhynchonellide brachiopods, with more than 500 extinct genera but only 19 extant genera represented today, provide an opportunity to explore the factors that produce contentious phylogenetic signal across datasets, as previous phylogenetic hypotheses generated from molecular sequence data bear little agreement with those constructed using morphological characters. Using a revised matrix of 66 morphological characters, and published ribosomal DNA sequences, we performed a series of combined phylogenetic analyses to identify conflicting phylogenetic signals. We completed a series of parsimony-based and Bayesian analyses, varying the data used, the taxa included, and the models used in the Bayesian analyses. We also performed simulation-based sensitivity analyses to assess whether the small size of the morphological data partition relative to the molecular data influenced the results of the combined analyses. In order to compare and contrast a large number of phylogenetic analyses and their resulting summary trees, we developed a measure for the incongruence between two topologies and simultaneously ignore any differences in phylogenetic resolution. Phylogenetic hypotheses generated using only morphological characters differed among each other, and with previous analyses, whereas molecular-only and combined Bayesian analyses produced extremely similar topologies. Characters historically associated with traditional classification in the Rhynchonellida have very low consistency indices on the topology preferred by the combined Bayesian analyses. Overall, this casts doubt on the use of morphological systematics to resolve relationships among the crown rhynchonellide brachiopods. However, expanding our dataset to a larger number of extinct taxa with intermediate morphologies is necessary to exclude the possibility that the morphology of extant taxa is not dominated by convergence along long branches.

Dataset Information

Testing for Deperet's Rule (Body Size Increase) in Mammals using Combined Extinct and Extant Data.

Publications

Testing for Depéret's Rule (Body Size Increase) in Mammals using Combined Extinct and Extant Data.

Similar Datasets

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