Early cephalopod evolution clarifed through Bayesian phylogenetic inference

0556603 - GLÚ 2023 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Pohle, A. - Kröger, B. - Warnock, R. C. M. - King, A. H. - Evans, D. H. - Aubrechtová, Martina - Cichowolski, M. - Fang, X. - Klug, Ch.
Early cephalopod evolution clarifed through Bayesian phylogenetic inference.
BMC BIOLOGY. Roč. 20, 14 April 2022 (2022), č. článku 88. E-ISSN 1741-7007
Institutional support: RVO:67985831
Keywords : Cephalopoda * Phylogeny * Nautiloidea * Orthoceratoidea * Multiceratoidea * Endoceratoidea * Bayesian phylogenetics * Fossilized birth-death process * Posterior clade probabilities * Tree similarities
OECD category: Paleontology
Impact factor: 5.4, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-022-01284-5

Background: Despite the excellent fossil record of cephalopods, their early evolution is poorly understood. Diferent,
partly incompatible phylogenetic hypotheses have been proposed in the past, which refected individual author’s
opinions on the importance of certain characters but were not based on thorough cladistic analyses. At the same
time, methods of phylogenetic inference have undergone substantial improvements. For fossil datasets, which typically only include morphological data, Bayesian inference and in particular the introduction of the fossilized birth-death model have opened new possibilities. Nevertheless, many tree topologies recovered from these new methods refect large uncertainties, which have led to discussions on how to best summarize the information contained in the posterior set of trees.
Results: We present a large, newly compiled morphological character matrix of Cambrian and Ordovician cephalopods to conduct a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis and resolve existing controversies. Our results recover three major monophyletic groups, which correspond to the previously recognized Endoceratoidea, Multiceratoidea, and Orthoceratoidea, though comprising slightly diferent taxa. In addition, many Cambrian and Early Ordovician representatives of the Ellesmerocerida and Plectronocerida were recovered near the root. The Ellesmerocerida is para- and polyphyletic, with some of its members recovered among the Multiceratoidea and early Endoceratoidea. These relationships are robust against modifcations of the dataset. While our trees initially seem to refect large uncertainties, these are mainly a consequence of the way clade support is measured. We show that clade posterior probabilities and tree similarity metrics often underestimate congruence between trees, especially if wildcard taxa are involved.
Conclusions: Our results provide important insights into the earliest evolution of cephalopods and clarify evolutionary pathways. We provide a classifcation scheme that is based on a robust phylogenetic analysis. Moreover, we provide some general insights on the application of Bayesian phylogenetic inference on morphological datasets. We
support earlier fndings that quartet similarity metrics should be preferred over the Robinson-Foulds distance when
higher-level phylogenetic relationships are of interest and propose that using a posteriori pruned maximum clade
credibility trees help in assessing support for phylogenetic relationships among a set of relevant taxa, because they
provide clade support values that better refect the phylogenetic signal
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0331465