Retroposed Elements as Archives for the Evolutionary History of Placental Mammals
Figure 2
Positions of Retroposed Elements as Landmarks of Evolution on the Bayesian-Based Placental Evolutionary Tree from Murphy et al. [ 2]
The resultant tree is consistent with previous studies [1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 38, 39] in most aspects. Note that the positions of afrotherians and xenarthras have been reversed, based on the presence of two retroposon insertions at node 2. Gray balls represent single insertion events. Supported splitting points are labeled with Arabic numerals. Superordinal clades, in the order shown, were established by Waddell et al. [6] and supported by several major studies [1, 2, 7, 8], and are labeled with Roman numerals. The taxa shown represent only those from which we sampled LINEs and LTRs. Dotted lines indicate nodes in need of further confirmation. Asterisks represent retroposon evidence from the literature for monophyly of Afrotheria [27], Primates [18], Rodentia [45], and Cetartiodactyla [26].