Figure 1. Most-parsimonious tree of bovine complete MtDNA sequences.

The tree is drawn to scale. Phylogeny construction was performed by hand following a parsimony approach, while the evolutionary distances were computed using the Maximum Likelihood (ML) method. The exact values for clades and subclades are available in Table 3 together with averaged distance (rho) of the haplotypes of a clade to the respective root haplotype. Sixteen of the sequences (#1–3, #5, #9–13, #16, #22–26, #28) are new, while the others were previously published: Bos taurus Reference Sequence (BRS) (GenBank accession number V00654) [45] # 14–15, #17 [9]; #4, #6–8, #19–21, #27 [10]; #18 [27]. Taking into account that sequence #18 is from an ancient British aurochs radiocarbon dated to 6,738±68 calibrated years BP, the divergence of the haplogroup P node is underestimated. Additional information regarding each mtDNA sequence, including GenBank accession numbers, is provided in Table 2. An additional branch, named E, placed between P and R has been reported previously [10], [26] but was not included in the tree since it is not a complete mitochrondrial genome sequence.