Reevaluation of the phylogenetic relationships among Neotomini rodents (, , and ) and comments on the woodrat classification.

The woodrats or packrats of the genus have been the subject of a wide array of research including paleoecology, physiology, morphological evolution, systematics, speciation, and hybridization. In recent years, much work has been done to elucidate evolutionary relationships within and between closely related species of the genus; in particular the addition of newly collected specimens from critical geographic regions has provided new opportunities for taxonomic assessment. Given these new data and their potential, parsimony (PARS), maximum likelihood (ML), and Bayesian inference (BI) analyses were conducted on DNA sequences obtained from nine individual genes (four mitochondrial loci: , , , and ; five nuclear loci: , , , , and ) to estimate the phylogenetic relationships among 23 species of .