BACK TO THE FUTURE - A SYNTHESIS OF STREPSIRRHINE SYSTEMATICS

The strepsirrhine primates, defined here as living tooth-combed primat es, their immediate ancestor, and all of its descendants, are a divers e assemblage of mammals, viewed by some as exemplars of the richness o f evolutionary innovation and by others as uninteresting ''primitive'' primates. Fortunately, the former view has taken precedence in recent years. The Strepsirrhini have been central to numerous debates touchi ng on key issues such as the congruence of phylogeny to biogeography, the reliability of morphological characters for phylogeny reconstructi on, and the relationship of living lineages to fossil lineages. Thanks to important theoretical and methodological advances, particularly wi thin the arena of genetics, a robust picture of strepsirrhine phylogen y is emerging that casts light on these and numerous other evolutionar y questions.