Reconciling African Elephant Phylogenies Figure 3. Relationship of the four groups identified by Johnson and colleagues to the F and S mtDNA clades and subclades described by other researchers. (A) Johnson et al. (2007) [16] proposed dividing elephants into four novel ‘‘groups’’ based on an unrooted network using the D-loop hypervariable region of mtDNA (reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution license, from BioMed Central Ltd). (B) We identified the mtDNA haplotypes of Debruyne (2005) [12] and Eggert et al. (2002) [15] within the Johnson et al. (2007) [16] network, finding that there was considerable overlap between the mtDNA diversity reported by Johnson et al. (2007) and the diversity reported by the prior studies. Debruyne (2005) [12] had reported strong support for a separation of African elephant mtDNA haplotypes into two deep subdivisions, designated mtDNA clades ‘‘F’’ and ‘‘S’’, subsequently verified by two other researcher teams [4,13]. Debruyne (2005) [12] established further subdivisions within the F clade (designated F1, F2, F4 and F5; the S clade was also designated S3 with no further subdivisions) [12,15]. Three of the groups identified by Johnson et al. (2007) [16] corresponded to subclades of the F clade previously identified by Debruyne (2005) [12]; the other corresponded to the S clade. (C) Across the previously reported mtDNA surveys of African elephants, sufficient overlap existed among sequences and individuals for mtDNA relationships to be established across all of the studies. Cladograms show the naming conventions used for S clade and F clade mtDNAs across different studies [4,12,13,16], including that of Johnson et al. (2007), which had incorporated the sequences of Eggert et al. (2002) [15] and Nyakaana PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 6 June 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 6 | e20642