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Description
The Capreolinae or New World deer are named as such as they are the only group of cervids native to the Americas. Despite this, they are also successfull in Eurasia. For example, out of the four species of deer naturally native to my European country, three of them are capreolines.

And among those are the reindeer or caribou of the genus Rangifer. Long believed to have only been one species, it turnes out that there might be six of them! Who knows, if we keep splitting them then maybe we'll get up to twelve eventually! Maybe one of them will even have a red nose. Considering it's the holidays, I figured I'd whip up this relatively more simple tree of only extant species in one subfamily to tide you over until I get become done with the Machairodontinae tree.

I learned two things from this: 1. South American deer generally are complex and 2. "Mazama" as a genus is a polyphyletic goddamn nightmare. Someone really has to sort all of those out and give a bunch of "Mazama"-species new genus names. I've chosen to include only the clade closest to the type species of Mazama as the "true" Mazama in this tree. Same with Pudu. The recently described Mazama tienhoveni has also not been included as there seems to be no genetic data available for that species.

The Northern huemul is apparently sister species with both the Southern huemul and the Pampas deer? Atleast according to Heckeberg (2020). I don't know what's happening there.

Apparently we've all been tricked by the reindeer aswell. Some Rangifer subspecies are waaaay more genetically divergent than whole genera of other cervids are from eachother. Like the genetic distance between Alces alces & Hydropotes inermis is 0.140 but between the Barren-ground caribou and the Greenland reindeer it's 0.334. Maybe Rangifer is going to become a whole tribe of its own? And the black-tailed deer are apparently also pretty divergent from the rest of the mule deer subspecies, and it has been suggested that those two subspecies should be regarded as different species.

Happy holidays everyone!

Primarily based on:
Yannick, 2013
Gutiérrez, 2017
Heckeberg, 2020
Harding, 2022

Made in TreeGraph 2.0

Description
The Capreolinae or New World deer are named as such as they are the only group of cervids native to the Americas. Despite this, they are also successfull in Eurasia. For example, out of the four species of deer naturally native to my European country, three of them are capreolines.

And among those are the reindeer or caribou of the genus Rangifer. Long believed to have only been one species, it turnes out that there might be six of them! Who knows, if we keep splitting them then maybe we'll get up to twelve eventually! Maybe one of them will even have a red nose. Considering it's the holidays, I figured I'd whip up this relatively more simple tree of only extant species in one subfamily to tide you over until I get become done with the Machairodontinae tree.

I learned two things from this: 1. South American deer generally are complex and 2. "Mazama" as a genus is a polyphyletic goddamn nightmare. Someone really has to sort all of those out and give a bunch of "Mazama"-species new genus names. I've chosen to include only the clade closest to the type species of Mazama as the "true" Mazama in this tree. Same with Pudu. The recently described Mazama tienhoveni has also not been included as there seems to be no genetic data available for that species.

The Northern huemul is apparently sister species with both the Southern huemul and the Pampas deer? Atleast according to Heckeberg (2020). I don't know what's happening there.

Apparently we've all been tricked by the reindeer aswell. Some Rangifer subspecies are waaaay more genetically divergent than whole genera of other cervids are from eachother. Like the genetic distance between Alces alces & Hydropotes inermis is 0.140 but between the Barren-ground caribou and the Greenland reindeer it's 0.334. Maybe Rangifer is going to become a whole tribe of its own? And the black-tailed deer are apparently also pretty divergent from the rest of the mule deer subspecies, and it has been suggested that those two subspecies should be regarded as different species.

Happy holidays everyone!

Primarily based on:
Yannick, 2013
Gutiérrez, 2017
Heckeberg, 2020
Harding, 2022

Made in TreeGraph 2.0