TY  - JOUR
A1  - Alter, S. Elizabeth
A1  - Meyer, Matthias
A1  - Post, Klaas
A1  - Czechowski, Paul
A1  - Gravlund, Peter
A1  - Gaines, Cork
A1  - Rosenbaum, Howard C.
A1  - Kaschner, Kristin
A1  - Turvey, Samuel T.
A1  - van der Plicht, Johannes
A1  - Shapiro, Beth
A1  - Hofreiter, Michael
T1  - Climate impacts on transocean dispersal and habitat in gray whales from the Pleistocene to 2100
JF  - Molecular ecology
N2  - Arctic animals face dramatic habitat alteration due to ongoing climate change. Understanding how such species have responded to past glacial cycles can help us forecast their response to today's changing climate. Gray whales are among those marine species likely to be strongly affected by Arctic climate change, but a thorough analysis of past climate impacts on this species has been complicated by lack of information about an extinct population in the Atlantic. While little is known about the history of Atlantic gray whales or their relationship to the extant Pacific population, the extirpation of the Atlantic population during historical times has been attributed to whaling. We used a combination of ancient and modern DNA, radiocarbon dating and predictive habitat modelling to better understand the distribution of gray whales during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Our results reveal that dispersal between the Pacific and Atlantic was climate dependent and occurred both during the Pleistocene prior to the last glacial period and the early Holocene immediately following the opening of the Bering Strait. Genetic diversity in the Atlantic declined over an extended interval that predates the period of intensive commercial whaling, indicating this decline may have been precipitated by Holocene climate or other ecological causes. These first genetic data for Atlantic gray whales, particularly when combined with predictive habitat models for the year 2100, suggest that two recent sightings of gray whales in the Atlantic may represent the beginning of the expansion of this species' habitat beyond its currently realized range.
KW  - ancient DNA
KW  - climate change
KW  - last glacial maximum
KW  - marine mammal
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.13121
SN  - 0962-1083
SN  - 1365-294X
VL  - 24
IS  - 7
SP  - 1510
EP  - 1522
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Chang, Dan
A1  - Knapp, Michael
A1  - Enk, Jacob
A1  - Lippold, Sebastian
A1  - Kircher, Martin
A1  - Lister, Adrian M.
A1  - MacPhee, Ross D. E.
A1  - Widga, Christopher
A1  - Czechowski, Paul
A1  - Sommer, Robert
A1  - Hodges, Emily
A1  - Stümpel, Nikolaus
A1  - Barnes, Ian
A1  - Dalén, Love
A1  - Derevianko, Anatoly
A1  - Germonpré, Mietje
A1  - Hillebrand-Voiculescu, Alexandra
A1  - Constantin, Silviu
A1  - Kuznetsova, Tatyana
A1  - Mol, Dick
A1  - Rathgeber, Thomas
A1  - Rosendahl, Wilfried
A1  - Tikhonov, Alexey N.
A1  - Willerslev, Eske
A1  - Hannon, Greg
A1  - Lalueza i Fox, Carles
A1  - Joger, Ulrich
A1  - Poinar, Hendrik N.
A1  - Hofreiter, Michael
A1  - Shapiro, Beth
T1  - The evolutionary and phylogeographic history of woolly mammoths
BT  - a comprehensive mitogenomic analysis
JF  - Scientific reports
N2  - Near the end of the Pleistocene epoch, populations of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) were distributed across parts of three continents, from western Europe and northern Asia through Beringia to the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Nonetheless, questions about the connectivity and temporal continuity of mammoth populations and species remain unanswered. We use a combination of targeted enrichment and high-throughput sequencing to assemble and interpret a data set of 143 mammoth mitochondrial genomes, sampled from fossils recovered from across their Holarctic range. Our dataset includes 54 previously unpublished mitochondrial genomes and significantly increases the coverage of the Eurasian range of the species. The resulting global phylogeny confirms that the Late Pleistocene mammoth population comprised three distinct mitochondrial lineages that began to diverge ~1.0–2.0 million years ago (Ma). We also find that mammoth mitochondrial lineages were strongly geographically partitioned throughout the Pleistocene. In combination, our genetic results and the pattern of morphological variation in time and space suggest that male-mediated gene flow, rather than large-scale dispersals, was important in the Pleistocene evolutionary history of mammoths.
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44585
SN  - 2045-2322
VL  - 7
PB  - Nature Publishing Group
CY  - London
ER  -