Re: [dinosaur] Smilodon and dire wolf injuries + shared genes favor crocodiles and birds as sister lineages

Ben Creisler

Apologies. Thanks for catching this error.

I had not read the paper itself yet and copied the passage from the news story that was based on a press release by Vanderbilt University. Apparently, it has now been corrected in the press release and the phys.org version:

This is what I found when I checked Google with the wording I quoted yesterday:

Forget sponges: the earliest animals were marine jellies | Research ...

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/.../forget-sponges-the-earliest-animals-were-marine-jellies/

1 day ago - They found that 74 percent of the shared genes favor the hypothesis that crocodiles and turtles are sister lineages while birds are close cousins ...

To set the record straight,here's what the current (corrected) press release says (now in line with Nick Gardner) :

"Another contentious relationship the researchers addressed was whether crocodiles are more closely related to birds or turtles. They found that 74 percent of the shared genes favor the hypothesis that crocodiles and birds are sister lineages while turtles are close cousins."

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/04/10/forget-sponges-the-earliest-animals-were-marine-jellies/

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On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 11:50 AM, David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:

In response to this...

Gesendet: Montag, 10. April 2017 um 18:42 Uhr
Von: "Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>

[...]

Xing-Xing Shen, Chris Todd Hittinger & Antonis Rokas (2017)
Contentious relationships in phylogenomic studies can be driven by a handful of genes.

Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, Article number: 0126 (2017)

doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0126

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0126

[...]

News:

74 percent of the shared genes favor the hypothesis that crocodiles and turtles are sister lineages while birds are close cousins.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-sponges-earliest-animals-marine-jellies.html

..., Nick Gardner asks me to forward the following:

=====================================

The paper does NOT say that 74% of shared genes support a turtle+crocodile hypothesis. It says the OPPOSITE.

On p. 6, it explicitly says "For example, similar to the well-established branch associated with the monophyly of amniotes on the vertebrate phylogeny that we used as a control (Figs 2–4), examination of the evolutionary placement of turtles (Table 1 and Figs 2–4) showed very strong support for the hypothesis that turtles are the sister group to archosaurs (birds + crocodiles). Specifically, the ΔGLS values of 74% (3,466 out of 4,682) of the genes in the data matrix favour this hypothesis over the second best alternative (turtles as sister group to crocodiles) (Supplementary Fig. 2a); the same is true for ΔSLS values (88% or 1,588,738 out of 1,806,035 sites favour turtles as the sister group to archosaurs rather than to just crocodiles; Supplementary Fig. 3b)."