(Phys.org) -- A team of evolutionary biologists compared the
anatomy and genes of bats to help solve a persistent question in
evolution: Why do analyses of different features of an organism
result in conflicting patterns of evolutionary relationships?
Their findings, Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons
from phyllostomid bats, appear in the August 14 edition of
Biological Reviews. To answer this question, Liliana Dávalos,
PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and
Evolution, and member of the Consortium for Inter-Disciplinary
Environmental Research (CIDER) at Stony Brook University, and
Andrea Cirranello of the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the
American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), together with
colleagues at the AMNH and the New York College of Osteopathic
Medicine, examined the skin, skeleton, muscle, tongue, internal
organs and a few genes of a family of New World bats, applying
statistical models to uncover the genetic and anatomical
features that produced the conflicts