History of side-necked turtle diversification revealed
A work authored by a group of paleontologists affiliated to University of São Paulo’s Biology Department in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil – published in Royal Society Open Science – is the most comprehensive phylogeny of the Pleurodira suborder of side-necked turtles produced. Pleurodira includes the Yellow-spotted Amazon River turtle (Podocnemis unifilis).
The study gathers phylogenetic, biogeographical and morphological data in search of an explanation for the biogeographical history of Pleurodira, especially the discrepancy between their distribution in the fossil record and in the world today.
The researchers decided to construct a new phylogeny of Pleurodira, tracing the group’s evolutionary history as broadly as possible in order to reveal unknown patterns of past biogeographical distribution.
The first step in building the phylogeny was a matrix analysis of 245 morphological characters in 101 species. “This matrix of morphological data for Pleurodira included both living and extinct species. The matrix was analyzed using parsimony, and from the analysis, we obtained a new phylogenetic tree for Pleurodira,” said Gabriel Ferreira, lead author of the article. The study is part of his PhD research, which is supported by a scholarship from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP and features supervision by Max Langer, a professor in USP.
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Photo from Gabriel Ferreira (FFCLRP-USP).
