A species-level phylogeny of Trachylepis (Scincidae: Mabuyinae) provides insight into their reproductive mode evolution

Publication date: Available online 6 April 2019Source: Molecular Phylogenetics and EvolutionAuthor(s): Jeffrey L. Weinell, William R. Branch, Timothy J. Colston, Todd R. Jackman, Arianna Kuhn, Werner Conradie, Aaron M. BauerAbstractTrachylepis (Mabuyinae) includes ∼80 species of fully-limbed skinks found primarily in Africa and Madagascar, but a robust species-level phylogeny for this genus is lacking and this impedes studies on a wide-range of topics from biogeography to character evolution. Trachylepis and its close relatives (which together form the Mabuya group or Mabuyinae) are notable in that they have undergone multiple transitions and remarkable specializations in their reproductive modes. A Trachylepis phylogeny will be particularly useful for investigating reproductive evolution, because it includes species that exhibit oviparity, viviparity, and bimodal parity (species with both oviparous and viviparous populations). We sequenced DNA at four mitochondrial and five nuclear loci for 67 (∼84% of) Trachylepis species to infer a phylogeny for this genus. We performed stochastic character mapping of parity mode under a variety of parity mode transition models to infer ancestral parity mode states and the number and type of parity mode transitions. We recovered a strongly supported phylogeny of Trachylepis that is generally consistent with earlier phylogenetic studies. The best-fit model of reproductive mode evolution supports an oviparous ancestor for Trachylepis, an...
Source: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution - Category: Molecular Biology Source Type: research