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Systematic Biology 2008 57(3):499-503; doi:10.1080/10635150802164504
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© 2008 Society of Systematic Biologists

Morphology and Placental Mammal Phylogeny

Edited by Mark Hafner

Mark S. Springer1, Robert W. Meredith1, Eduardo Eizirik2, Emma Teeling3 and William J. Murphy4

1 Department of Biology, University of California Riverside, CA 92521, USA; E-mail: mark.springer@ucr.edu (M.S.S.)
2 Faculdade de Biociencias, PUCRS Porto Alegre, RS 90619-900, Brazil
3 School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University College Dublin Belfield Dublin, 4, Ireland
4 Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4458, USA

Received January 23, 2008; Revised February 4, 2008; Accepted March 14, 2008
The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In a recent article on placental mammal phylogeny (Springer et al., 2007), we discussed evidence for correlated character evolution among morphological characters. We also performed pseudoextinction analyses that assessed whether placental orders remained in the expected superordinal group (Afrotheria, Xenarthra, Euarchontoglires, Laurasiatheria) when molecular and soft-tissue data were coded as missing and only osteological data from Asher et al. (2003) remained for the pseudoextinct taxa. Finally, we examined congruence among 21 molecular data partitions and Asher et al.'s (2003) morphological data. Our results demonstrated that most placental orders moved to a different superordinal group when treated as pseudoextinct and also that Asher et al.'s (2003) morphological data consistently emerged as the most incongruent data partition. Based on these results, we questioned the ability of current morphological data sets and phylogenetic methods to reconstruct higher level relationships among placental mammals. In their response to our paper, Asher et al. . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Congruence and the Major Clades of Placental Mammals
 

   Use of a Single Morphological Data Set
 

   Pseudoexintction Techniques
 

   Primacy of Morphology for Extinct Taxa
 

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