Fig. 1

African herbivore gut microbiotas exhibit patterns consistent with phylosymbiosis. a Phylogenetic tree of host species (left) obtained from pruning Upham’s et al. 2019 Mammalian supertree, compared against a dendogram (right) of gut microbiota similarity using hierarchical clustering. b Scatterplot of pairwise host divergence times (in millions of years) vs. gut microbiota similarity (Bray-Curtis distances) across all sampled herbivores (left) and within the single host family Bovidae (right). The plot on the left has a trendline representing the best fit line of a linear model regressing Bray-Curtis dissimilarity with host phylogenetic distance, which was added for plotting purposes. c PCoA plots constructed from Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrices. Each point represents a sample and is color-coded by host family (left) or host dietary guild (right). Closeness of points indicates high community similarity. The percentage of variance accounted for by each principal-coordinate axis is shown in the axis labels. d PCoA plots constructed from Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrices of bovid species only. Each point is color-coded by host species (left) or host dietary guild (right)