New ‘rodents and rabbits’ cladogram

Asher et al. 2019
bring us a new phylogenetic + genomic cladogram of rabbits + rodents (clade = Glires) that fails to include taxa recovered by the large reptile tree (LRT, 1552 taxa, subset Fig. 1).

From their abstract:
“Our results support the widely held but poorly tested intuition that fossils resemble the common ancestors shared by living species, and that fossilizable hard tissues (i.e. bones and teeth) help to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of life.”

From their results:
“Our analysis supports Glires and three major clades within crown Rodentia: Sciuromorpha (squirrels and kin), Myomorpha ((beavers + gophers) + mice and kin), and Ctenohystrica (porcupines, chinchillas and kin).”

The LRT
also supports these divisions. It also supports the basal nesting of ‘Tupaiidae’ relative to Glires. It does not support the inclusion of Primates within Glires, but the two are sister clades within a single clade. The LRT supports the basal nesting of Didelphis relative to Metatheria and Eutheria.

Some oddities in the results of Asher et al. 2019.

1. Papio, the baboon, nests between Dermoptera (flying lemurs/colugos) and Plesiadapis + lemurs. That’s way too primitive for such a derived monkey.
2. Rodent-toothed Pleisadapis nests with baboons and lemurs. This is a traditional nesting not recovered by the wider gamut LRT where Plesiadapis nests closer to multituberculates and the aye-aye, Daubentonia.

Asher et al. 2019 included dormice
(Eliomys and kin; Fig. 2), and found them to be rather primitive, closer to squirrels. So Eliomys was added to the LRT and it nested with Mus, the mouse.

How to tell a mouse from a dormouse.
The skulls are similar, but different. The dormouse tail is furry, not scaly. Dormice are more arboreal. The dormouse hibernates rather than seeking warm spots. Fossil dormice are found in the Eocene, but their genesis must go back to the Early Jurassic, where multituberculates are found, according to the LRT.

References
Asher RJ, Smith MR, Rankin A and Emry RJ 2019. Congruence, fossil and the evolutionary tree of rodents and lagomorphs. Royal Society Open Science 6:190387. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190387