Deciphering and dating the red panda’s ancestry and early adaptive radiation of Musteloidea

Phylogenetic history of mustelid fauna in Taiwan inferred from mitochondrial genetic loci

“…Trees were rooted using species of the subfamily Guloninae (martens, wolverine, and allies), based on the phylogenetic hypothesis that the subfamilies Helictidinae (ferret badgers), Lutrinae (otters and allies), and Mustelinae (minks, polecats, weasels, and allies) are more closely related to each other, than to Guloninae (Sato et al , 2006(Sato et al , 2009aFulton and Strobeck 2006;Koepfli et al 2008;Wolsan and Sato 2010). See Sato et al (2009a) for the rationale for using the subfamily name Guloninae, instead of Martinae, as proposed by Fulton and Strobeck (2006) and followed by Koepfli et al (2008).…”

“…The mean of the lognormal distribution was unavoidably set to somewhat subjective values (Ho 2007). The standard deviation was assigned so that upper limit of the 95% credible interval (CI) of the lognormal distribution took a value of times for divergences one step older in the phylogenetic topologies (the time for the first emergence of the stem lineage of the clade of interest) based on the estimations from Koepfli et al (2008) and Sato et al (2009a). When the age of the fossil record directly ancestral to the extant species could be used, the younger age for this ancestor (possible extinction age) was used for the upper limit of the 95% CI of the lognormal distribution.…”

“…The mean value was set to 2.0. The standard deviation was set so that the upper limit of the 95% CI took the value of 9.6, as the divergence time for Mustela-Neovison and the closest clade (consisting of the Lutrinae species) was estimated to be 8.7-9.0 Ma by Koepfli et al (2008) and 9.6 Ma by Sato et al (2009a Sato et al 2003 for more detail). The mean value was set to 1.0.…”

Occurrence and morphometrics of the brachioradialis muscle in wild carnivorans (Carnivora: Caniformia, Feliformia)

“…Despite this diversity, the accumulated knowledge of myological variation within the order is still incomplete (MACALISTER 1873a, MACKINTOSH 1875, WINDLE & PARSONS 1897, HALL 1926, 1927, HOWARD 1973, LEACH 1976, FISCHER et al 2009, MOORE et al 2013, ERCOLI et al 2014. Hence, these animals provide a good model for this study, as they represent one of the most successful cases of repeated and independent evolution of similar morphologies in a great range of ecologies (ANDERSSON 2004a, b, 2005, NOWAK 2005, SATO et al 2009, SLATER et al 2012, FABRE et al 2013a, SAMUELS et al 2013, MARTÍN-SERRA et al 2014. The locomotor range of movements of carnivorans includes, to varying extents, climbing, digging, running and swimming (ANDERSSON & WERDELIN 2003).…”

A new otter of giant size,Siamogale melilutrasp. nov. (Lutrinae: Mustelidae: Carnivora), from the latest Miocene Shuitangba site in north-eastern Yunnan, south-western China, and a total-evidence phylogeny of lutrines

“…Old World badgers Meles and Arctonyx). Most recent molecular phylogenies of mustelids also place the lutrines near the terminal end of the mustelid tree, but as the sister clade of the genus Mustela (Koepfli & Wayne 1998;Sato et al 2003Sato et al , 2009J. J. Flynn et al 2005;Koepfli et al 2008a), as the sister clade of Ictonychinae (Dragoo & Honeycutt 1997;Koepfli & Wayne 2003;Wolsan & Sato 2010;Sato et al 2012), or as both (Koepfli et al 2008b).…”