U.S. Department of Commerce
Date of this Version
2001
Abstract
SINE (short interspersed element) insertion analysis elucidates contentious aspects in the phylogeny of toothed whales and dolphins (Odontoceti), especially river dolphins. Here, we characterize 25 informative SINEs inserted into unique genomic loci during evolution of odontocetes to construct a cladogram, and determine a total of 2.8 kb per taxon of the flanking sequences of these SINE loci to estimate divergence times among lineages. We demonstrate that: (i) Odontocetes are monophyletic; (ii) Ganges River dolphins, beaked whales, and ocean dolphins diverged (in this order) after sperm whales; (iii three other river dolphin taxa, namely the Amazon, La Plata, and Yangtze river dolphins, form a monophyletic group with Yangtze River dolphins being the most in basal; and (iv) the rapid radiation of extant cetacean lineages occurred some 28-33 million years B.P., in strong accord with the fossil record. The combination of SINE and flanking sequence analysis suggests a topology and set of divergence times for odontocete relationships, offering alternative explanations for several long-standing problems in cetacean evolution.
Comments
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 98, No. 13 (Jun. 19, 2001), pp. 7384-7389.