🧵 (2/3)
To resolve the history of these large-sized #mammals, we integrate a dependency-coded matrix of 54 discrete characters and 42 morphogeometric and 5 continuous characters, across a sample of 37 taxa.
✅ 5 major lineages recovered
✅ Character weight ranking
✅ Ancestral reconstructions
🧵 (1/3)
What makes South American Ungulates so unique?🦏🍃 #FossilFriday
Check out our new comprehensive combined-evidence #phylogeny of #Toxodontidae!!! #Paleontology #Evolution #Fossils #Argentina #CONICET
doi.org/10.1111/cla....
Posting this as supporting material: a recent vert paleo example of "new school cladistics": parsimony using a carefully curated dataset with explicit coding of character dependencies and integration with morphometric and continuous characters doi.org/10.1111/cla....
We also provide additional discussion and background of the onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... step matrix approach to #inapplicables that is used in our recent onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... paper on #phylogenetic methods to incorporate different types of character dependence.
If you see this quote with flowers from your gallery.
We can all use some beauty right now (Quercus robur L., pedunculate oak, in Belgium; www.plantsystematics.org/imgs/jdelaet...)
In onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Pol & Ezcurra present a fully scripted (TNT & R, incl. publication-ready graphics) #parsimony based workflow for estimating rates. It deals with ambiguous optimizations and multiple MPTs and can use different calibration approaches. Nice work! #phylogeny
AI perpetuates knowledge artefacts. Mind you, a look at PubMed will tell you that humans are pretty good at perpetuating these too.. theconversation.com/a-weird-phra... ht @cyrilpedia.bsky.social
A new morphological phylogeny of Malacostraca comparing the application of character dependencies and implied weighting - Grams - Cladistics - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
Mati Armella
Mati Armella
No such thing as a free lunch: a note on what 'natural' means in the Phylogenetic Minimum Description Length optimality criterion and how PMDL relocates substantive assumptions into the chosen description language onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Evidence for phylogenetic analysis comes in the form of observed similarities, and trees are selected to minimize the number of similarities that cannot be accounted for by homology (homoplasies). Th...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Toxodontidae represents a major extinct radiation of South American native ungulates, but persistent polytomies in morphological phylogenies have masked its evolutionary history. To address this, we ...
We describe a protocol for estimating evolutionary rates from phylogenetic trees based on parsimony character optimization. The rate estimation is conducted through a TNT script and the results are a...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Once errors creep into the AI knowledge base, they can be very hard to get out.
Using a new character matrix composed of revised matrices of previous analyses and new morphological findings, the phylogeny of Malacostraca (Pancrustacea) is analysed anew with 207 characters for 35...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it
Wheeler and Varón (2025) proposed phylogenetic minimum description length (PMDL) as a phylogenetic optimality criterion grounded in algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity. PMDL applies the minimum descr...
