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Dryad

Data from: phylogenomics of the Neogastropoda: the backbone hidden in the bush

Abstract

The molluscan order Neogastropoda encompasses over 15,000 almost exclusively marine species playing important roles in benthic communities and in the economics of coastal countries. Neogastropoda underwent intensive cladogenesis in early stages of diversification, generating a ‘bush’ at the base of their evolutionary tree, that has been hard to resolve even with high throughput molecular data. In the present study we analyze a comprehensive exon capture dataset of 1,817 loci (79.6% data occupancy), comprising 112 taxa of 48 (out of 60) recent Neogastropoda families with a variety of phylogenetic inference methods to resolve their relationships. Our results show consistent topologies and high support in all analyses at (super)family level, supporting monophyly of Muricoidea, Mitroidea, Conoidea, and, with some reservations, Olivoidea and Buccinoidea. Volutoidea and Turbinelloidea as currently circumscribed are clearly paraphyletic. Despite our analyses consistently resolve most backbone nodes, three prove problematic. First, uncertain placement of Cancellariidae, as a sister group of either a Ficoidea-Tonnoidea clade, or of the rest of Neogastropoda, leaves monophyly of Neogastropoda unresolved. Second, relationships are contradictory at the base of the major grouping the ‘core Neogastropoda’. Third, coalescence-based analyses reject monophyly of the Buccinoidea in relation to Vasidae. We analysed loci phylogenetic signal in relation with potential biases, and propose most probable resolutions in the two latter recalcitrant nodes. The uncertain placement of Cancellariidae may be explained by orthology violations due to the differential paralog loss short after the whole genome duplication, and should be resolved with a curated set of longer loci.