Oldenburg University Professor of Molecular Systematics, Prof Dr Olaf Bininda-Emonds, is an expert in superfamily trees. The scientist has now published an updated version of the super phylogenetic tree for carnivores in the journal BMC Biology.
Bininda-Edomonds' current research dates back to 1999: predators and their evolutionary relationships have been the focus of the Canadian-born scientist for years. He and his team were the first to systematically summarise the relationships of all living carnivore species (Carnivora). The research results published by the scientist, who was working in Oxford (UK) at the time, were part of a super-family tree for all living mammal species, which was published in the renowned scientific journal Nature in 2007 and caused a sensation not only among experts. Since then, rapid progress in molecular biology has provided a wealth of new DNA information, which Bininda-Emonds and Katrin Nyakatura (University of Jena) have used to update the Carnivora family tree. "Updating the evolutionary history of Carnivora (Mammalia): a new species-level supertree complete with divergence time estimates" is the title of their article for the British open access journal BMC Biology, in which they present their update to the evolutionary tree of carnivores.
For the super-family tree, which includes all recent (living) carnivore species - from lions to weasels - the researchers summarised the information from many small phylogenetic family trees. Through targeted database analysis, they compiled the largest data matrix to date for the group of carnivores - around 45,000 base pairs of DNA for 74 genes. They combined this information with existing data from a total of 114 studies and thus obtained the updated super-family tree.
"It provides," explains Bininda-Emonds, "completely new insights into the evolutionary development of this fascinating group of mammals and sheds light on important periods of diversification - for example, the evolutionary step 53 million years ago when carnivorous mammals emerged, and the period between 18 and 7.3 million years ago when numerous new species emerged within this mammalian order," says the biologist. The super phylogenetic tree thus forms the basis for a large number of further research projects on this mammalian order.