RECONCILING MORPHOLOGY AND GENETICS IN TREE SQUIRRELS

In my Bachelor and Master projects I explored the origins of tree squirrels of the tribe Sciurini. I used museum samples to follow their colonization routes from Eurasia, through North America, and all the way to Central and South America, where they recently went through an adaptive radiation.

I also investigated the discrepancy between molecular and morphological data - while morphology recognizes five genera, molecular data only show three. Our analyses of DNA from museum specimens and geometric morphometrics of skulls of the same specimens confirmed the inconsistency. We modelled the relationship between morphology and dietary preferences and found a link between the shape of a skull and diet in the polyphyletic genus Microsciurus, suggesting that the morphological resemblance of Microsciurus species is a result of convergent evolution due to adaptation to insectivory. Moreover, we simulated acentral ranges and found that the epicenter of speciation in South America was in western Amazonia, possibly in the wet tropical forests on the foothills of Andes.

These projects were supervised by Dr. Natália Martínková at the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Publications