BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Bioinform.
Sec. Evolutionary Bioinformatics
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbinf.2025.1710926
Completing a molecular timetree of Afrotheria
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Biology, College of Science and Technology, Temple University, Philadelphia, United States
- 2Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University, Philadelphia, United States
- 3Temple University Center for Biodiversity, Philadelphia, United States
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Afrotheria, the superorder that includes aardvarks, elephants, elephant shrews, hyraxes, manatees, and tenrecs is home to some of the most charismatic and well-studied animals on Earth. Here, we assemble a nearly taxonomically complete molecular timetree of Afrotheria using an integrative approach that combines literature search for published timetrees, de novo dating of untimed molecular phylogenies, and inference of timetrees from new alignments. The resulting timetree sheds light on the role of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) impact ~66 million years ago in the diversification of Afrotherian orders. The earliest divergence in the timetree of Afrotherian mammals predates the K-Pg event by 12 million years, followed by five interordinal divergences that occurred gradually over a 16 million-year period encompassing the K-Pg event.
Keywords: Afrotheria, KPg, phylogeny, Dating, evolution
Received: 22 Sep 2025; Accepted: 21 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Craig, Fisher, Thomas, Hedges and Kumar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jack M Craig, jack.craig@temple.edu
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