HIGHLY CONGRUENT MOLECULAR SUPPORT FOR A DIVERSE SUPERORDINAL CLADE OF ENDEMIC AFRICAN MAMMALS

A solution to higher level mammalian phylogeny is going to depend on t he congruent establishment of superordinal groupings followed by a lin king together of these clades. We present congruent and convincing evi dence from four disparate nuclear protein coding genes and from a tand em alignment of the 12S-16S mitochondrial region, for a superordinal c lade of endemic African mammals that includes elephant shrews, aardvar ks, golden mole, elephants, sirenians, and hyraxes. Because of strong support for golden mole as part of this clade, the Insectivora are ren dered paraphyletic or polyphyletic, with constrained monophyly of the insectivores judged significantly worse in the vast majority of tests. Branching arrangement within this clade remains highly uncertain; how ever, a tandem alignment of the protein coding genes suggests elephant shrew is the earliest African lineage. None of the individual data se ts or combinations of data sets support the widely held view of a miro rder Tethytheria (Sirenia/Proboscidea), although only a tandem alignme nt of protein coding and mitochondrial loci significantly rejects this association. The majority of the data sets and analyses provide stron g support for Caviomorpha as part of a monophyletic Rodentia. (C) 1998 Academic Press.