Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Elife. 2018 Oct 9;7:e39270. doi: 10.7554/eLife.39270.
Flying squirrels are the only group of gliding mammals with a remarkable diversity and wide geographical range. However, their evolutionary story is not well known. Thus far, identification of extinct flying squirrels has been exclusively based on dental features, which, contrary to certain postcranial characters, are not unique to them. Therefore, fossils attributed to this clade may indeed belong to other squirrel groups. Here we report the oldest fossil skeleton of a flying squirrel (11.6 Ma) that displays the gliding-related diagnostic features shared by extant forms and allows for a recalibration of the divergence time between tree and flying squirrels. Our phylogenetic analyses combining morphological and molecular data generally support older dates than previous molecular estimates (23 Ma), being congruent with the inclusion of some of the earliest fossils (36 Ma) into this clade. They also show that flying squirrels experienced little morphological change for almost 12 million years.
飞鼠是唯一一类具有显著多样性和广泛地理分布范围的滑翔哺乳动物。然而,它们的进化故事并不为人所知。到目前为止,已灭绝飞鼠的鉴定仅基于牙齿特征,这些特征与某些后躯特征不同,并非它们所特有。因此,归入该分支的化石可能确实属于其他松鼠类群。在这里,我们报告了最古老的飞鼠化石骨架(1160 万年前),它显示了与现存形式共享的滑翔相关的诊断特征,并允许对树松鼠和飞鼠的分化时间进行重新校准。我们结合形态学和分子数据进行的系统发育分析普遍支持比以前的分子估计(约 2300 万年前)更早的日期,与将一些最早的化石(约 3600 万年前)归入该分支是一致的。它们还表明,飞鼠在近 1200 万年的时间里几乎没有发生形态变化。