Dissertation Research: Phylogenetic Relationships and Historical Biogeography of Onychomys (Rodentia: Cricetidae: Grasshopper Mice) in Western North America

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Until very recently, characters that would allow us to record biogeographic histories upon very recent landscapes (in geologic time) were not readily available. Patterns discerned from restriction enzyme and electrophoretic data can be used to estimate the historical pattern of relationship between distinct physiographic regions, based on the analysis of concordance between patterns of common ancestry in organisms and the inferred history of physical changes that variously allow dispersal or that erect barriers between regions. A number of biological attributes suggest that mice in the genus Onychomys provide an excellent opportunity to reconstruct a model of late Tertiary and Quaternary (i.e., the past 3-4 million years or so) biogeographic flux among deserts and grasslands in North America. Additionally, this study will provide a synthesis of data (molecular, morphological, and behavioral) that will serve to initiate investigations into patterns of variation across a range of levels of biological organization, from phenotype to nucleotide sequence.