Fabre P. H. auteur aut IRD Tilak M. K. auteur aut IRD Denys C. auteur aut IRD Gaubert Philippe auteur aut IRD Nicolas V. auteur aut IRD Douzery E. J. P. auteur aut IRD Marivaux L. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf born digital access Anomaluroidea, commonly known as the scaly-tailed squirrels, are an emblematic group of tropical African mammals that includes gliding forms. The family Anomaluridae was until recently represented by three genera: the flying scaly-tailed squirrels (Anomalurus), the flying mouse (Idiurus) and the flightless scaly-tailed squirrels (Zenkerella). Idiurus and Zenkerella have long been grouped into the Zenkerellinae subfamily, and Zenkerella was interpreted as a rare case of evolutionary reversal to non-gliding lifestyle. Recent studies have demonstrated that Zenkerella is sister to all other modern anomalurids, and represents in fact the monogeneric family Zenkerellidae. The Anomalurus genus was split into Anomalurus and Anomalurops, but no study has ever considered all Anomalurus species together in a phylogeny to test the status of Anomalurops. Here, we used mitogenomic next-generation sequencing to infer the phylogenetic relationships among all extant anomalurids and to estimate their divergence ages. We found that the arboreal Zenkerella is the sister group of all extant gliding anomalurids (Idiurus and Anomalurus). We confirmed that Anomaluroidea only evolved the gliding adaptation once. A comparison based on morphological traits indicates that Zenkerella harbours several unique morphological features. We propose new morphological characters for the novel classification of modern Anomaluroidea, which includes the families Zenkerellidae and Anomaluridae. Using different calibration schemes, we demonstrated that classical dating methods relying only on mitogenomes provide rather young Miocene estimates between Zenkerellidae and the Anomaluridae. The use of published nuclear genes, internal calibrations and tip dating converged towards an Eocene split between gliding and non-gliding scaly-tailed squirrels, which is in agreement with the African fossil record. Finally, we provide the first exhaustive species-level molecular phylogenetic inference for the genus Anomalurus. We found that Anomalurus beecrofti is the sister group of all other species of Anomalurus and branched off during the Miocene. specialized AFRIQUE ZONE TROPICALE 080 064 47 4 404-417 2018 0300-3256 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010073632 10.1111/zsc.12286 0300-3256 [F B010073632] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010073632 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/intranet/publi/2018/07/010073632.pdf Accès réservé (Intranet de l'IRD) IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2018-09-03 2023-07-11 fdi:010073632 fre