Abstract:
Published in a leading journal of molecular evolutionary, this article presents the largest databases available to date of mitochondrial and nuclear intron sequences to estimate the ‘neutral’ rate of molecular evolution in the largest species of animals ever to have lived, the baleen whales. The results demonstrated, the despite the rapid morphological divergence of whales from their a terrestrial ancestors, their underlying rate of molecular evolution is the lowest measured for any mammal. Times Cited: 12 (from Web of Science). I initiated the study with a grant from the Marsden Fund and directed the laboratory analyses and assembly of the sequence database. I supervised the first author, my postdoctoral fellow, and assisted in writing the manuscript.
