Meeting Abstract
With 84 putative species in 33 genera, Musteloidea is the most speciose Carnivoran clade. Equally impressive is the great ecomorphological diversity found across Musteloidea, where species exhibit diverse arboreal, fossorial, or aquatic lifestyles as well as a variety of diets ranging from the generalist diets of raccoons, skunks, and badgers to the specialized diets of the herbivorous red panda, hypercarnivorous weasels, and piscivorous otters. Despite their great ecological diversity, the lack of a time-calibrated phylogeny consisting of all musteloid genera has prevented further analyses investigating the macroevolutionary processes that underlie this diversity. Here, we present a complete generic-level time-calibrated phylogeny of Musteloidea using a 46 mitochondrial and nuclear gene dataset from 75 putative musteloid species (88% of Musteloidea) and 11 fossil constraints. Additionally, to test the hypothesis that mustelids exhibit greater rates of diversification relative to the background rates across Musteloidea, we reconstruct the dynamics of musteloid speciation and extinction using BAMM (Bayesian Analysis of Macroevolutionary Mixtures), a relatively new model that quantifies heterogeneity in evolutionary rates with a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo. Our results confirm the monophyly within the four musteloid clades—Mustelidae (badgers, martens, otters, and weasels), Procyonidae (raccoons and allies), Ailuridae (red pandas), and Mephitidae (skunks and stink badgers)—in congruence to previous phylogenetic analyses; however, certain clades remain paraphyletic. Mean speciation rate for Musteloidea is 0.214 lineages/million years, and mustelids exhibited greater diversification rates then procyonids and mephitids. Our analyses will allow for future research on how ecomorphological diversity contributes to musteloid diversity and why species diversity is so unevenly distributed within Musteloidea.
