An international team of scientists including University of Florida researchers has generated the most comprehensive tree of life to date on placental mammals, which are those bearing live young, including bats, rodents, whales and humans.

Appearing in the journal Science, the study details how researchers used both genetic and physical traits to reconstruct the common ancestor of placental mammals, the creature that gave rise to many mammals alive today. The data show that contrary to a commonly held theory, the group diversified after the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The research may help scientists better understand how mammals survived past climate change and how they may be impacted by future environmental conditions.

UF researchers led the team that analyzed the anatomy of living and fossil primates, including lemurs, monkeys and humans, as well as their closest living relatives, flying lemurs and tree shrews. The multi-year collaborative project was funded by the National Science Foundation Assembling the Tree of Life Program.

"With regards to evolution, it's critical to understand the relationships of living and fossil mammals before asking questions about 'how' and 'why,' " said co-author Jonathan Bloch, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. "This gives us a new perspective of how major change can influence the history of life, like the extinction of the dinosaurs -- this was a major event in Earth's history that potentially then results in setting the framework for the entire ordinal diversification of mammals, including our own very distant ancestors."

Visual reconstruction of the placental ancestor -- a small, insect-eating animal - was made possible with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called MorphoBank, www.morphobank.org. Unlike other reconstructions, the new study creates a clearer picture of the tree of life by combining two data types: Phenomic data includes observational traits such as anatomy and behavior, while genomic data is encoded by DNA.

"Discovering the tree of life is like piecing together a crime scene -- it is a story that happened in the past that you can't repeat," said lead author Maureen O'Leary, an associate professor in the department of anatomical sciences in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. "Just like with a crime scene, the new tools of DNA add important information, but so do other physical clues like a body or, in the scientific realm, fossils and anatomy. Combining all the evidence produces the most informed reconstruction of a past event."

Researchers recorded observational traits for 86 placental mammal species, including 40 fossil species. The resulting database contains more than 12,000 images that correspond to more than 4,500 traits detailing characteristics like the presence or absence of wings, teeth and certain bones, type of hair cover and brain structures. The dataset is about 10 times larger than information used in previous studies of mammal relationships.

"It was a great way to learn anatomy, in a nutshell," said co-author Zachary Randall, a UF biology graduate student and research associate at the Florida Museum. "While coding for humans, I could clearly see which anatomical features are unique, shared or not shared with other groups of mammals. This study is a great backbone for future work."

Bloch and Randall collaborated with study co-authors Mary Silcox of the University of Toronto Scarborough and Eric Sargis of Yale University to characterize humans, plus seven other living and one fossil species from the clade Euarchonta, which includes primates, tree shrews and flying lemurs.

"I think this database is amazing because it's being presented in such a way that it will be reproducible for the future generations," Bloch said. "It illustrates exactly what we did and leaves nothing to the imagination - you can actually go to the pictures and see it."

The evolutionary history of placental mammals has been interpreted in very different ways depending on the data analyzed. One leading analysis based on genomic data alone predicted that a number of placental mammal lineages existed in the Late Cretaceous and survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

"It has been suggested that primates diverged from other mammals well before the extinction of the dinosaurs, but our work using direct evidence from the fossil record tells a different story," Bloch said.

The team reconstructed the anatomy of the placental common ancestor by mapping traits most strongly supported by the data to determine it had a two-horned uterus, a brain with a convoluted cerebral cortex, and a placenta in which maternal blood came in close contact with membranes surrounding the fetus, as in humans.

Canadian researcher helps put humans on the tree of life
Toronto, Canada (SPX) Feb 10 - A University of Toronto Scarborough researcher was part of a team that reconstructed the family tree of placental mammals - a diverse group that includes cats, dogs, horses and humans. The research traces placental mammals back to a small, scampering, insect-eating creature that got its start 200,000 years or more after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The work is featured in this week's Science magazine.

Mary Silcox, assistant professor of anthropology at UTSC, is a co-author on the paper and the only Canadian member of the team. She was responsible for organizing the dental traits used in the analysis and contributed to the collection of the data that were used to classify primates, including humans.

"We were responsible for putting humans in the tree of life," she says, referring to her work with Drs. Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History and Eric Sargis of Yale University.

The research team used the world's largest dataset combining genetic and physical traits to reconstruct the placental mammal tree of life. A major finding is that placental mammals diversified much later than previous theories had suggested, with all of the major groups alive today originating after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Genetic evidence alone had suggested that placental mammals were already a diverse group in the Late Cretaceous period, before the event that drove the dinosaurs and 70 percent of other then-existing species extinct.

But by adding evidence from fossils, the team concluded that placental mammals arose a few hundred thousand years after the extinction event.

To carry out the study, the researchers built a database that recorded physical - or phenomic - traits for 86 placental mammal species, including 40 species that are extinct and known only from fossils.

More than 4,500 traits, including the presence or absence of wings, teeth, and certain bone types, were recorded in the database and used to construct the tree of life, in combination with genetic data.

The phenomic dataset is 10 times larger than those that had previously been used to study mammal relationships, is publicly available online, and illustrated with over 12,000 images.

Silcox says that the work will serve as a model for future projects that will give us a better idea of how species evolved and are related to one another.