Browsing by Subject "Biological anthropology"
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Item Effects of Additional Postcranial Data on the Topologies of Early Eocene Primate Phylogenies(2021) Stone, JuliaThere are multiple hypotheses regarding the locomotor behaviors of the last common ancestor to primates and which fossil primates best represent that ancestor. These hypotheses rely on morphological and phylogenetic analyses of extinct and extant primate taxa. Two competing conclusions are outlined in Dunn et. al. (2016) and Boyer et. al. (2017). These analyses provide fossil taxa as evidence for their rationale but only the Boyer et al. (2017) research also includes a phylogenetic analysis. Boyer et al.’s (2017) argument relies upon the integration of a new fossil, the talus of Donrussellia provincialis, into known datasets, while Dunn et al. (2016) employs the functional analysis of a larger catalogue of fossils from the Vastan mine site. The goal of this research was to conduct a phylogenetic analysis incorporating data from both Dunn et al. (2016) and Boyer et al. (2017). Heuristic tree searches in TNT were conducted on three datasets: one from the Boyer et al. (2017) paper, another that includes just the postcranial elements from Boyer et al. (2017) but with additional taxa and character states, and the final being a combination of the first two. The resulting cladograms show significant differences in topology. All trees present D. provincialis as a relatively basal adapiform; more so in matrices that include craniodental characters. All of the trees whose datasets were expanded to include additional postcranial characters put the Vastan species in primitive positions as well. Adding new postcranial data changed the organization of the cladograms most notably in areas containing Vastan primates and D. provincialis. Creating trees from these expanded datasets allows for interpretations and conclusions to be based on results that include all relevant taxa and fossil specimens.