RHINOCRYPTIDAE AND OTHER

Maurício, Giovanni Nachtigall, Areta, Juan Ignacio, Bornschein, Marcos Ricardo & Reis, Roberto E., 2012, Morphology-based phylogenetic analysis and classification of the family Rhinocryptidae (Aves: Passeriformes), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 166 (2), pp. 377-432 : 418

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RHINOCRYPTIDAE AND OTHER FAMILIES OF FURNARIIDES

Once a monophyletic Rhinocryptidae is defined, the next natural question to be answered is about its family-level relationships. Although the present study was not specifically designed to address this question, the phylogeny recovered here was resolved at this level and this finding will be briefly discussed below.

The sister relationship of Rhinocryptidae to the Scleruridae + Furnariidae + Dendrocolaptidae clade as recovered in this study is not a completely novel systematic arrangement. On the basis of a general similarity in the shape of the maxillopalatine bone, Garrod (1877a) argued for a sister relationship between Rhinocryptidae and Furnariidae (then including Scleruridae), but with Dendrocolaptidae being regarded as a more distant group. More recent anatomical studies, on the other hand, have suggested a closer relationship of rhinocryptids to the Grallariidae , Formicariidae , and Conopophagidae ( Ames, 1971) , an association corroborated by the DNA–DNA hybridization studies of Sibley & Ahlquist (1985, 1990). The latter studies further indicated that within that assemblage the family Conopophagidae was the sister-group to the Rhinocryptidae .

No cladistic analysis recovered a sister relationship of the Rhinocryptidae as depicted in the present study, but most taxonomically comprehensive analyses have found topologies that are consistent with it in a slightly broader context. Irestedt et al. (2002, 2009), Chesser (2004), Claramunt & Rinderknecht (2005), Claramunt (2010), Ericson et al. (2010), and Derryberry et al. (2011) recovered a large clade exclusively containing the families Rhinocryptidae , Scleruridae, Furnariidae , Dendrocolaptidae , and Formicariidae (as in the present study), within which Rhinocryptidae was either sister to a clade formed by the remaining four families, sister to the Formicariidae or was part of a polytomy with the latter plus a Scleruridae + Furnariidae + Dendrocolaptidae clade. Only the topology found by Moyle et al. (2009) challenged this general arrangement in that it included the Grallariidae as sister to the Rhinocryptidae . Although support for such a hypothesis was moderate to low, Moyle et al. (2009) recognized formally the Rhinocryptidae + Grallariidae clade under the superfamily-level taxon Grallarioidea. However, despite the large number of base pairs of the analysed dataset (about 4000 bp of the nuclear genes RAG 1 and RAG 2) and the dense taxonomic sampling of the Moyle et al. (2009) study, there is much stronger evidence for a clade containing only Rhinocryptidae , Formicariidae , Furnariidae , Scleruridae, and Dendrocolaptidae than for a sister-taxon relationship of rhinocryptids to the Grallariidae . The evidence supporting the former hypothesis includes both morphological ( Claramunt & Rinderknecht, 2005; this study) and molecular phylogenies ( Irestedt et al., 2002, 2009; Chesser, 2004; Claramunt, 2010; Ericson et al., 2010; Derryberry et al., 2011), with the latter studies including from 1500 to 3600 characters from several distinct genes (including RAG 1). Moreover, the recent genome-wide study of Hackett et al. (2008) included an unprecedented number of characters (32 000 bp) sampled for representatives of most higher-level groups of living birds, including four genera/families of Furnariides , and recovered with strong support the topology ( Thamnophilus ( Grallaria ( Scytalopus + Dendrocolaptes ))), a result consistent with the above phylogenies except that of Moyle et al. (2009). Therefore, diverse and independent lines of evidence reject the hypothesis of a sister relationship of Rhinocryptidae to the Grallariidae but support a clade containing only the former and the families Formicariidae , Scleruridae, Furnariidae , and Dendrocolaptidae . See also Rice (2005), who suggested merging of the Rhinocryptidae into the Formicariidae based on a molecular phylogeny that included only representatives of these two families plus Grallariidae , Conopophagidae , and Thamnophilidae .