Ancestor of All Placental Mammals Revealed

Well, yes, the headline is misleading, but it's also a bit more than a "possible" ancestor.

The researchers in the study wanted to create a better phylogenetic reconstruction of the evolution of mammals than had been previously accomplished, to resolve whether divergence of placental mammals from non-plancental mammals (egg-laying / marsupials) occurred before or after the extinction of the Dinosaurs (the K-T boundary), and also to make predictions of the biology of that last common ancestor. Previous phylogenetic reconstructions had been done with molecular data (DNA or protein sequences), but molecular data is limited to extant species and makes a lot of assumptions about the rates of changes in DNA that get more unreliable the further back in time you go. This study combined molecular data with character traits they call 'phenomic' characters - from the paper: "4541 phenomic characters de novo for 86 fossil and living species." The resulting matrix of traits, both molecular and character, was used to generate a tree based on maximum parsimony [wikipedia.org] - a method which minimizes the number of trait changes over time when building a tree. This resulted in a single, highest scoring tree predicting the evolution of these species and the changes in their traits over time. The resulting tree is then "clocked" (called 'time-calibration in the paper) to known rates of evolution for the molecular data (good for recent divergence of species) and by fossil data to give time ranges for the deeper sections of the tree. This last part is key, as you cannot get molecular data from fossils, and fossils allow you to map the existence of certain traits within a group to a certain point in the history of these organisms.

The result is a time-range in which the last common ancestor between placental and NON-placental mammals must have lived, given the data provided and the parsimony criterion. As the tree makes claims about when the phenomic characters evolved or were lost, it also predicts which phenomic characters the last common ancestor had.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/0idVGDzH4SU/story01.htm

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