RESEARCH ARTICLE
Mitochondrial DNA Phylogenetic Definition of a Group of ‘Arid-Zone’ Carduelini Finches
Antonio Arnaiz-Villena1, *, Juan Moscoso1, Valentin Ruiz-del-Valle1, Javier Gonzalez2, Raquel Reguera1, Almudena Ferri1, Michael Wink2, Juan Ignacio Serrano-Vela1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 1
First Page: 1
Last Page: 7
Publisher Id: TOOENIJ-1-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874453200801010001
Article History:
Received Date: 28/11/2007Acceptance Date: 11/01/2008
Electronic publication date: 30/1/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Birds included within the Carduelini tribe (genera Rhodopechys, Carpodacus and Leucosticte) apparently belong to the same radiation according to molecular phylogenetic analyses. Our phylogenetic analyses based on nucleotide sequences of the cytochrome b gene (cyt-b) indicate that some of these birds (Rhodopechys mongolica, R. githaginea and Carpodacus nipalensis) do not cluster together with their respective phenetically defined allies. This new group of birds thrives in both hot and cold arid zones and are phenetically distinct, probably because of their adaptation to different extreme environments. Both maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference methods support the existence of this new evolutionary basal group among finches which might have originated about 14 million years ago.