PHYLOGENETIC ANALYSIS OF ANTHROPOID RELATIONSHIPS

The relationships of anthropoids to other primates are currently debat ed, as are the relationships among early fossil anthropoids and crown anthropoids. To resolve these issues, data on 291 morphological charac ters were collected for 57 taxa of living and fossil primates and anal yzed using PAUP and MacClade. The dental evidence provides weak suppor t for the notion of an adapid origin for anthropoids, the cranial evid ence supports the tarsier-anthropoid hypothesis, and the postcranial e vidence supports a monophyletic Prosimii and a monophyletic Anthropoid ea. Combining these data into a single data set produces almost univer sal support for a tarsier-anthropoid clade nested within omomyids. Eos imias and Afrotarsius are certainly members of this clade, and probabl y basal anthropoids, although the Shanghuang petrosal may not belong t o Eosimias. The tree derived from the combined data set resembles the tree derived from the cranial data set rather than the larger dental d ata set. This may be attributable to relatively slower evolution in th e cranial characters. The combined data set shows Anthropoidea to be m onophyletic but the features traditionally held to be anthropoid synap omorphies are found to have evolved mosaically. Parapithecines are the sister taxon to crown anthropoids; qatraniines and oligopithecids are more distantly related sister taxa. There is support for a relationsh ip of a Tarsius+Anthropoidea clade with either washakiines or Uintaniu s. These elements of tree topology remain fairly stable under differen t assumptions sets, but overall, tree topology is not robust. Previous ly divergent hypotheses regarding anthropoid relationships are attribu table to the use of restricted data sets. This large data set enables the adapid-anthropoid hypothesis to be rejected, and unites Tarsius, A nthropoidea and Omomyiformes within a clade, Haplorhini. However, rela tionships among these three taxa cannot be convincingly resolved at pr esent. (C) 1998 Academic Press.