The 10kTrees website: A new online resource for primate phylogeny

By Christian Arnold, Luke J. Matthews, C. Nunn. 2010

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The comparative method plays a central role in efforts to uncover the adaptive basis for primate behaviors, morphological traits, and cognitive abilities. 1–4 The comparative method has been used, for example, to infer that living in a larger group selects for a larger neocortex, 5 , 6 that primate territoriality favors a longer day range relative to home range size, 7 and that sperm competition can account for the evolution of primate testes size. 8 , 9 Comparison is fundamental for reconstructing behavioral traits in the fossil record, for example, in studies of locomotion and diet. 10–13 Recent advances in comparative methods require phylogenetic information, 2 , 14–16 but our knowledge of phylogenetic information is imperfect. In the face of uncertainty about evolutionary relationships, which phylogeny should one use? Here we provide a new resource for comparative studies of primates that enables users to run comparative analyses on multiple primate phylogenies Importantly, the 10,000 trees that we provide are not random, but instead use recent systematic methods to create a plausible set of topologies that reflect our certainty about some nodes on the tree and uncertainty about other nodes, given the dataset. The trees also reflect uncertainty about branch lengths.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4eabde17047f97ac4d783ca788ed23a9f5091a14

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Citations in the corpus

Innovative Approaches to the Relationship Between Diet and Mandibular Morphology in Primates (2012, methodology): “Here, we used a sample of 100 dated phylogenies from a recent Bayesian inference of primate phylogeny (Arnold et al. 2010), which can be accessed at http://10ktrees.fas. harvard.edu/.”
The macroevolutionary relationship between diet and body mass across mammals (2015, methodology): “For primates, we downloaded 100 topologies randomly sampled from the posterior distribution from the 10k trees website (Arnold et al., 2010).”