What is it about?
Phylogenetic analyses are essential to understand how organisms relate to each other. These analyses depend on taxon (e.g. species)-character datasets. The phenotype (e.g. morphology) provides numerous sources of data to such datasets, and are of great value to understand species relationships. Here, we provide a compilation and evaluation of numerous logically based criteria and basic set of rules for creating/sampling morphological characters for phylogenetic datasets. We show how numerous characters currently used for these analyses fail those criteria, deeply affecting our current notions of squamate (lizards and snakes) relationships.
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Perspectives
This is a study that was conducted for three years, and is part of my PhD thesis. What we hope to achieve is a more critical view for the construction of datasets, providing less subjective and logically sound basis to a methodological practice that is essential to understand how living forms relate to each other.
Tiago Simoes
University of Alberta
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Giant taxon-character matrices: quality of character constructions remains critical regardless of size, Cladistics, April 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/cla.12163.
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