The effects of fossil taxa, hypothetical predicted ancestors, and a molecular scaffold on pseudoextinction analyses of extant placental orders.

ABSTRACT: Pseudoextinction analyses, which simulate extinction in extant taxa, use molecular phylogenetics to assess the accuracy of morphological phylogenetics. Previous pseudoextinction analyses have shown a failure of morphological phylogenetics to place some individual placental orders in the correct superordinal clade. Recent work suggests that the inclusion of hypothetical ancestors of extant placental clades, estimated by ancestral state reconstructions of morphological characters, may increase the accuracy of morphological phylogenetic analyses. However, these studies reconstructed direct hypothetical ancestors for each extant taxon based on a well-corroborated molecular phylogeny, which is not possible for extinct taxa that lack molecular data. It remains to be determined if pseudoextinct t

SUBMITTER: Brady PL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8448315 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature