Laurasiatheria

Laurasiatheria Temporal range: 66.3–0  Ma [1] PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N Late Cretaceous to present
From top to right: European hedgehog, Lyle's flying fox, Siberian tiger, Indian pangolin, red deer and white rhino. Representing the living orders: Eulipotyphla, Chiroptera, Carnivora, Pholidota, Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla, comprising Laurasiatheria.
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Magnorder:	Boreoeutheria
Superorder:	Laurasiatheria Waddell et al., 1999 [2]
Subgroups
[see classification]
Synonyms
Eurasiatheria (Matsui & Pyenson, 2023) [3] Hoplopoda (Goldfuss, 1820) Laurasiaplacentalia (Arnason, 2008) [4]

Laurasiatheria ( /lɔːrˌeɪʒəˈθɪəriə,-θɛriə/ ; "Laurasian beasts") is a superorder of placental mammals that groups together true insectivores (eulipotyphlans), bats (chiropterans), carnivorans, pangolins (pholidotes), even-toed ungulates (artiodactyls), odd-toed ungulates (perissodactyls), and all their extinct relatives (pan-euungulates). From systematics and phylogenetic perspectives, it is subdivided into order Eulipotyphla and clade Scrotifera. ^{[2] [5] [6]} It is a sister group to Euarchontoglires with which it forms the magnorder Boreoeutheria. Laurasiatheria was discovered on the basis of the similar gene sequences shared by the mammals belonging to it; no anatomical features have yet been found that unite the group, although a few have been suggested such as a small coracoid process, a simplified hindgut (reversed in artiodactyls), high intelligence, lack of grasping hands (though mimicry of grasping is observed in felines) and allantoic vessels that are large to moderate in size. ^[7] The Laurasiatheria clade is based on DNA sequence analyses and retrotransposon presence/absence data. The superorder originated on the northern supercontinent of Laurasia, after it split from Gondwana when Pangaea broke up. ^[2] Its last common ancestor is supposed to have lived between ca. 76 to 90 million years ago. ^{[8] [9]}

Etymology

The name of this superorder derives from the theory that this group of mammals originated on the supercontinent of Laurasia. ^[2] In contrast, extinct primitive mammals called Gondwanatheria existed in the supercontinent of Gondwana.

Classification and phylogeny

History of phylogeny

Phylogenetic position of living laurasiatherians (in green) among placentals in a genus-level molecular phylogeny of 116 extant mammals inferred from the gene tree information of 14,509 coding DNA sequences. The other major clades are colored: marsupials (magenta), xenarthrans (orange), afrotherians (red), and Euarchontoglires (blue).

Uncertainty still exists regarding the phylogenetic tree for extant laurasiatherians, primarily due to disagreement about the placement of orders Chiroptera (bats) and Perissodactyla. Based on morphological grounds, bats had long been classified in the superorder Archonta (e.g. along with primates, treeshrews and the gliding colugos) until genetic research instead showed their kinship with the other laurasiatheres. ^[11] The studies conflicted in terms of the exact placement of Chiroptera, however, with it being linked most closely to groups such as order Eulipotyphla in the clade Insectiphillia. Two 2013 studies retrieve that bats, pangolins, carnivorans and euungulates form a clade Scrotifera, indicating that Eulipotyphla might be the sister group to all other Laurasiatheria taxa. ^{[12] [13]}

Taxonomy

Former classification:

Current classification:

Superorder: Laurasiatheria(Waddell, 1999) (laurasian placental mammals) Grandorder: Ferungulata (Simpson, 1945) Mirorder: Euungulata (Waddell, 2001) (true ungulates) Mirorder: Ferae (Linnaeus, 1758) Clade: Insectiphillia (Waddell, 2001) Order: Chiroptera (Blumenbach, 1779) (bats) Order: Eulipotyphla (Waddell, 1999) (true insectivores)

Superorder: Laurasiatheria(Waddell, 1999) (laurasian placental mammals) Order: Eulipotyphla (Waddell, 1999) (true insectivores) Clade: Scrotifera (Waddell, 1999) Grandorder: Ferungulata (Simpson, 1945) Clade: Apo-Chiroptera (Cirranello, Simmons & Gunnell, 2020) (bats) Family: †Eosoricodontidae (Lopatin, 2005) Genus: † Acmeodon (Matthew & Granger, 1921) Genus: † Avunculus (Van Valen, 1966) Genus: † Gelastops (Simpson, 1935) Incertae sedis : † "Wyonycteris" microtis (Secord, 2008)

Phylogeny

The phylogenetic relationships of superorder Laurasiatheria are shown in the following cladogram, reconstructed from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA and protein characters, as well as the fossil record. ^{[14] [9] [7] [15] [16] [17] [18]}

Placentalia	† Taeniodonta † Alveugena † Procerberidae † Ambilestes † Palaeoryctida Atlantogenata Boreoeutheria Euarchontoglires ? † Veratalpa Laurasiatheria Eulipotyphla Scrotifera Apo-Chiroptera † "Wyonycteris" microtis † Eosoricodontidae Ferungulata † Acmeodon † Avunculus † Gelastops

See also

• Mammal classification
• Boreoeutheria
• Gondwanatheria – a clade of mammaliaforms named after supercontinent of Gondwana

References

1. Archibald, J. David; Zhang, Yue; Harper, Tony; Cifelli, Richard L. (6 May 2011). "Protungulatum, confirmed Cretaceous occurrence of an otherwise Paleocene eutherian (placental?) mammal" (PDF). Journal of Mammalian Evolution. 18 (3): 153–161. doi:10.1007/s10914-011-9162-1. S2CID   16724836. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
2. Waddell, Peter J.; Okada, Norihiro; Hasegawa, Masami (1999). "Towards Resolving the Interordinal Relationships of Placental Mammals". Systematic Biology . 48 (1): 1–5. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/48.1.1 . PMID   12078634.
3. Matsui, K.; Pyenson, N. D. (2023). "New evidence for the antiquity of Desmostylus (Desmostylia) from the Skooner Gulch Formation of California". Royal Society Open Science. 10 (6). 221648. Bibcode:2023RSOS...1021648M. doi: 10.1098/rsos.221648 . PMC   10264998 . PMID   37325600.
4. Arnason U., Adegoke J. A., Gullberg A., Harley E. H., Janke A., Kullberg M. (2008.) "Mitogenomic relationships of placental mammals and molecular estimates of their divergences." Gene.; 421(1–2):37–51
5. Nikaido, M.; Rooney, A. P. & Okada, N. (1999). "Phylogenetic relationships among cetartiodactyls based on insertions of short and long interpersed elements: Hippopotamuses are the closest extant relatives of whales". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 96 (18): 10261–10266. Bibcode:1999PNAS...9610261N. doi: 10.1073/pnas.96.18.10261 . PMC   17876 . PMID   10468596.
6. Groves, Colin; Grubb, Peter (1 November 2011). Ungulate Taxonomy. JHU Press. p. 27. ISBN   978-1-4214-0093-8. OCLC   708357723.
7. O'Leary, Maureen A.; Bloch, Jonathan I.; Flynn, John J.; Gaudin, Timothy J.; Giallombardo, Andres; Giannini, Norberto P.; Goldberg, Suzann L.; Kraatz, Brian P.; Luo, Zhe-Xi; Meng, Jin; Ni, Xijun; Novacek, Michael J.; Perini, Fernando A.; Randall, Zachary S.; Rougier, Guillermo W.; Sargis, Eric J.; Silcox, Mary T.; Simmons, Nancy B.; Spaulding, Michelle; Velazco, Paúl M.; Weksler, Marcelo; Wible, John R.; Cirranello, Andrea L. (2013). "The Placental Mammal Ancestor and the Post–K-Pg Radiation of Placentals". Science. 339 (6120): 662–667. Bibcode:2013Sci...339..662O. doi:10.1126/science.1229237. hdl: 11336/7302 . PMID   23393258. S2CID   206544776.
8. dos Reis, Mario; Inoue, Jun; Hasegawa, Masami; Asher, Robert J.; Donoghue, Philip C. J.; Yang, Ziheng (7 September 2012). "Phylogenomic datasets provide both precision and accuracy in estimating the timescale of placental mammal phylogeny". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 279 (1742): 3491–3500. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0683. ISSN   0962-8452. PMC   3396900 . PMID   22628470.
9. Zhou, Xuming; Xu, Shixia; Xu, Junxiao; Chen, Bingyao; Zhou, Kaiya; Yang, Guang (1 January 2012). "Phylogenomic Analysis Resolves the Interordinal Relationships and Rapid Diversification of the Laurasiatherian Mammals". Systematic Biology. 61 (1): 150–64. doi:10.1093/sysbio/syr089. ISSN   1063-5157. PMC   3243735 . PMID   21900649.
10. Scornavacca C, Belkhir K, Lopez J, Dernat R, Delsuc F, Douzery EJ, Ranwez V (April 2019). "OrthoMaM v10: Scaling-up orthologous coding sequence and exon alignments with more than one hundred mammalian genomes". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 36 (4): 861–862. doi:10.1093/molbev/msz015. PMC   6445298 . PMID   30698751.
11. Pumo, Dorothy E.; Finamore, Peter S.; Franek, William R.; Phillips, Carleton J.; Tarzami, Sima; Balzarano, Darlene (1998). "Complete Mitochondrial Genome of a Neotropical Fruit Bat, Artibeus jamaicensis, and a New Hypothesis of the Relationships of Bats to Other Eutherian Mammals". Journal of Molecular Evolution . 47 (6): 709–717. Bibcode:1998JMolE..47..709P. doi:10.1007/PL00006430. PMID   9847413. S2CID   22900642.
12. Tsagkogeorga, G; Parker, J; Stupka, E.; Cotton, J. A.; Rossiter, S. J. (2013). "Phylogenomic analyses elucidate the evolutionary relationships of bats". Current Biology. 23 (22): 2262–2267. Bibcode:2013CBio...23.2262T. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.014 . PMID   24184098.
13. Morgan, C. C.; Foster, P. G.; Webb, A. E.; Pisani, D.; McInerney, J. O.; O'Connell, M. J. (2013). "Heterogeneous models place the root of the placental mammal phylogeny". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 30 (9): 2145–2256. doi:10.1093/molbev/mst117. PMC   3748356 . PMID   23813979.
14. Waddell, Peter J.; Kishino, Hirohisa; Ota, Rissa (2001). "A phylogenetic foundation for comparative mammalian genomics". Genome Informatics . 12: 141–154. PMID   11791233. Archived from the original on 10 July 2019. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
15. Foley, Nicole M.; Springer, Mark S.; Teeling, Emma C. (19 July 2016). "Mammal madness: Is the mammal tree of life not yet resolved?". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 371 (1699): 20150140. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0140. ISSN   0962-8436. PMC   4920340 . PMID   27325836.
16. Esselstyn, Jacob A.; Oliveros, Carl H.; Swanson, Mark T.; Faircloth, Brant C. (26 August 2017). "Investigating Difficult Nodes in the Placental Mammal Tree with Expanded Taxon Sampling and Thousands of Ultraconserved Elements". Genome Biology and Evolution. 9 (9): 2308–2321. doi:10.1093/gbe/evx168. ISSN   1759-6653. PMC   5604124 . PMID   28934378.
17. Frank Zachos (2020.) "Mammalian Phylogenetics: A Short Overview of Recent Advances", In book: "Mammals of Europe - Past, Present, and Future" (pp.31-48)
18. Xue Lv, Jingyang Hu, Yiwen Hu, Yitian Li, Dongming Xu, Oliver A. Ryder, David M. Irwin, Li Yu (2021.) "Diverse phylogenomic datasets uncover a concordant scenario of laurasiatherian interordinal relationships", Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Volume 157

Further reading

• Murphy, William J.; Eizirik, Eduardo; O'Brien, Stephen J.; Madsen, Ole; Scally, Mark; Douady, Christophe J.; Teeling, Emma; Ryder, Oliver A.; Stanhope, Michael J.; de Jong, Wilfried W.; Springer, Mark S. (2001). "Resolution of the Early Placental Mammal Radiation Using Bayesian Phylogenetics". Science . 294 (5550): 2348–2351. Bibcode:2001Sci...294.2348M. doi:10.1126/science.1067179. PMID   11743200. S2CID   34367609.
• Springer, Mark S.; Murphy, William J.; Eizirik, Eduardo; O'Brien, Stephen J. (2003). "Placental mammal diversification and the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 100 (3): 1056–1061. Bibcode:2003PNAS..100.1056S. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0334222100 . PMC   298725 . PMID   12552136.
• Wildman, Derek E.; Chen, Caoyi; Erez, Offer; Grossman, Lawrence I.; Goodman, Morris; Romero, Roberto (2006). "Evolution of the mammalian placenta revealed by phylogenetic analysis". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 103 (9): 3203–3208. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103.3203W. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0511344103 . PMC   1413940 . PMID   16492730.
• Kriegs, Jan Ole; Churakov, Gennady; Kiefmann, Martin; Jordan, Ursula; Brosius, Jürgen; Schmitz, Jürgen (2006). "Retroposed Elements as Archives for the Evolutionary History of Placental Mammals". PLOS Biology . 4 (4): e91. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040091 . PMC   1395351 . PMID   16515367.
• Nikolaev, Sergey; Montoya-Burgos, Juan I.; Margulies, Elliott H.; NISC Comparative Sequencing Program; Rougemont, Jacques; Nyffeler, Bruno; Antonarakis, Stylianos E. (2007). "Early History of Mammals is Elucidated with the ENCODE Multiple Species Sequencing Data". PLOS Genetics . 3 (1): e2. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0030002 . PMC   1761045 . PMID   17206863.
• Kitazoe, Yasuhiro; Kishino, Hirohisa; Waddell, Peter J.; Nakajima, Noriaki; Okabayashi, Takahisa; Watabe, Teruaki; Okuhara, Yoshiyasu (2007). Hahn, Matthew (ed.). "Robust Time Estimation Reconciles Views of the Antiquity of Placental Mammals". PLOS ONE . 2 (4): e384. Bibcode:2007PLoSO...2..384K. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000384 . PMC   1849890 . PMID   17440620.
• Goloboff, Pablo A.; Catalano, Santiago A.; Mirande, J. Marcos; Szumik, Claudia A.; Arias, J. Salvador; Källersjö, Mari; Farris, James S. (2009). "Phylogenetic analysis of 73 060 taxa corroborates major eukaryotic groups". Cladistics . 25 (3): 211–230. doi: 10.1111/j.1096-0031.2009.00255.x . hdl: 11336/78055 . PMID   34879616. S2CID   84401375.
• Churakov, G.; Kriegs, J. O.; Baertsch, R.; Zemann, A.; Brosius, J. R.; Schmitz, J. R. (2009). "Mosaic retroposon insertion patterns in placental mammals". Genome Research . 19 (5): 868–875. doi:10.1101/gr.090647.108. PMC   2675975 . PMID   19261842.

External links

• Data related to Laurasiatheria at Wikispecies