Re: [dinosaur] Solenodon venom evolution since Cretaceous (free pdf)

Funnily enough, that paper _still_ uses the oldest "erinaceomorph", the tooth taxon *Litolestes* from the late Paleocene, to calibrate the split between Erinaceidae and Soricidae. As usual, it cites outdated secondary literature for that (in this case the great big morphological placental phylogeny by Leary et al. 2013). The other two calibrations are largely defensible, though; that, together with finding very short branch lengths in Eulipotyphla and allowing enough rate variation between clades, appears to have been enough to keep the entire eulipotyphlan crown-group in the Cenozoic.
 
In passing, the paper also mentions the age of the oldest known crown-group carnivoran as 42 Ma, citing a work from 2006. In larger analyses (i.e. since 2012), the 42.8-Ma-old *Tapocyon* has been found outside the crown-group; that means the oldest members of the crown-group are only about 38 Ma old.
 
Interesting phylogenetic position for the moles (to the extent that it _is_ a position, given all the incomplete lineage sorting).

Gesendet: Mittwoch, 27. November 2019 um 19:09 Uhr
Von: "Alberta Claw" <[email protected]>

> Indeed. A recent paper looking at this problem from a phylogenomic perspective is:
>
> Sato, J.J., T.M. Bradford, K.N. Armstrong, S.C. Donnellan, L.M. Echenique-Diaz, G. Begué-Quiala, J. Gámez-Díez, N. Yamaguchi, S.T. Nguyen, M. Kita, and S.D. Ohdachi. 2019. Post K-Pg diversification of the mammalian order Eulipotyphla as suggested by phylogenomic analyses of ultra-conserved elements. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 141: 106605. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2019.106605