Assessment of cladistic data availability for living mammals
Author(s)
Guillerme, T
Cooper, N
Type
Dataset
Abstract
Analyses of living and fossil taxa are crucial for understanding changes in biodiversity through time. The Total Evidence method allows living and fossil taxa to be combined in phylogenies, by using molecular data for living taxa and morphological data for both living and fossil taxa. With this method, substantial overlap of morphological data among living and fossil taxa is crucial for accurately inferring topology. However, although molecular data for living species is widely available, scientists using and generating morphological data mainly focus on fossils. Therefore, there is a gap in our knowledge of neontological morphological data even in well-studied groups such as mammals. We investigated the amount of morphological (cladistic) data available for living mammals and how this data was phylogenetically distributed across orders. 22 of 28 mammalian orders have
Date Issued
2015-10-15
Citation
2015
Subjects
Total Evidence Method
topology
cladistic
morphological
extinct
phylogenetics
Molecular Biology
Bioinformatics
Paleontology
Zoology
Evolutionary Biology