ksagnostic

That seems to be the gist of the research reported here. In current taxonomy, flying lemurs are not considered primates, but rather representatives of their own order. According to this research reported here, flying lemurs are not only primates, they are the closest relatives to the anthropoids (apes AND monkeys-the reporter used the term apes way too broadly). If true, this is big and startling news.

<a href="http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0620022.htm" target="_blank">http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0620022.htm</a>

Hopefully, the link will pan out. I actually got the article on alloprimate.

Posting on something other than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals "under God" brouhaha.

Edited to add: I looked at skull pictures, and noticed all the skulls identified as primate had the characteristic completely enclosed orbits. The flying lemur skull did not. Any morphological taxonomy experts out there? The FL skull sure looks to be different from the primate skulls (prosimians included) as a group, in my relatively uninformed opinion.

[ June 27, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]

[ June 27, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]</p>

ksagnostic

I think the "half-apes" referred to here must be prosimians. Is this a cultural difference in referring to primates?

Nic Tamzek

I'm not sure that link is giving us the whole story...things like the below worry me greatly:


Among other things:

1) It's my understanding that there's no such thing as a New World ape, unless you want to count Homo sapiens who are considered to be of relatively recent extraction.

2) What the hell is a "half-ape"????

I know what he's talking about, but either the speaker Arnason was misquoted or he was having a very bad day ("not separate species" ????)

Or a more innocent explanation:

Arnason's english is not so good, plus the reporter doesn't know enough to understand what Arnason actually meant.

I'm developing a file on "clueless scientific reporting", here's another exhibit.

"UniSci: Daily University Science News" Sigh.


OTOH, I think what the actual finding might be is that the [non]flying [nonlemur]lemur order might be the order most closely related to the primate order. I'm not even sure if this is that unconventional, along with bats this seems to be a fairly common pre-molecular suggestion. Molecular studies have shaken things up considerably in the "relationships of placental mammal orders" category, although as usual actual disagreement is quite limited in that:

1) None of the placental orders has been placed outside of the placental mammals group (e.g., in marsupials, or reptiles or plants or any other of the innumerable logically possible arrangements)

2) None of the orders has been drastically nested within another, which is also a logically possible arrangement (e.g., the elephants could all nest as the closest relatives of humans, but don't).

These kinds of large-scale considerations are important to keep in mind when discussing agreements & disagreements of phylogenetic trees with creos. [/end undirected rant]


Don't have text access at the moment, maybe someone could find the PNAS abstract...

ksagnostic

Thanks for your reply.

Like you, I found the terminology used in the article extremely weird. Since Anthropoida refers to apes and monkeys, I assumed that the author of the report and the scientist quoted were both using the term "apes" far, far more broadly than is proper in my experience.

I am also wanting to find that PNAS abstract. The article was confusing, and my impression of what was being claimed, that the colugo/flying lemur is more closely related to monkeys and apes than prosimians, might have been mistaken. Certainly, from what little I could see when I looked at the morphology of skulls, the colugo skull seemed to lack traits that were common among all the primate skulls (particularly the enclosed orbits). However, I do not pretend to be an expert on morphology.

MrDarwin

As it turns out, it's not such new news. This paper published in Nature, February 2001, showed essentially the same thing:

<a href="http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/bi216home/molectree_nature.pdf" target="_blank">Molecular phylogenetics and the origin of placental mammals</a>

Nic Tamzek

Ah, here we go. The abstract makes things pretty clear:

The cohort Glires is, in turn, the sister group of primates, flying lemurs and tree shrews. Within primates, lemur (Strepsirhini) and tarsier (Tarsiiformes) were found to be sister taxa (bootstrap $80%) that were separated from anthropoids by a deep divergence. This contrasts with the widely held view that tarsiers are more
closely related to anthropoids than to Strepsirhini 17. Furthermore, although maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses consistently supported the monophyly of Primates and the sister-group relationship between Dermoptera and Scandentia, distance-
based trees suggested primate paraphyly by placing flying lemurs as the sister group to anthropoids, and by placing tree shrews basal
among the three orders (Fig. 1). Kishino±Hasegawa (parsimony and likelihood) and Templeton tests failed to reject either of these hypotheses (P .0.1 in all cases), which indicates that further sampling within Dermoptera and Scandentia may be required to fully resolve the deep, contemporaneous divergence among these three orders.
[/quote]

...which implies that flying lemurs would be quite close to primates and *perhaps* *within* them, but it's a close call back in 2001.

Anthropoid = apes + monkeys, right?

The primates page at the ToL has a diagram of where everything fits (traditionally at least):

<a href="http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Primates&contgroup=Eutheria" target="_blank">http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Primates&contgroup=Eutheria</a>


nic

Nic Tamzek

Ah, here seem to be the recent articles:

So, the PNAS study says primates are (a little) paraphyletic, the MBE study implies flying lemur sisterhood to primates...

I don't have text access at the moment, others may find more relevant stuff in them...

nic