falsify a molecular phylogeny based on evidence from geographic or morphological evidence. However, a phylogeny reconstructing extinct relationships, which usually did not preserve molecular evidence, is difficult to falsify. When studying paleontology, constructing phylogenetic hypotheses is important, yet we are always struggling in debates over which phylogenetic cladogram is closest to the ...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0129939.].

The story of the evolution of the horse family was codified so early in the history of the science of vertebrate paleontology, and has been repeated so often since that time by scientific popularizers, that the history of this family of mammals has, at least for the general public, become litany. This brief discussion breaks little new ground, but nevertheless much of what is presented here wil...

A recent article by Scotland et al. (2003; hereafter referred to as SEA) purporting to examine the value of morphological data in phylogeny reconstruction has been received critically by several systematists (Jenner, 2004; Wiens, 2004). As paleontologists—and in an area of systematics restricted solely to morphological data—we take exception to many of the arguments put forward by SEA and feel ...

Different sources of data on the evolution of segmentation lead to very different conclusions. Molecular similarities in the developmental pathways generating a segmented body plan tend to suggest a segmented common ancestor for all bilaterally symmetrical animals. Data from paleontology and comparative morphology suggest that this is unlikely. A possible solution to this conundrum is that thro...

The 1856 discovery of the Neandertal type specimen (Neandertal 1) in western Germany marked the beginning of human paleontology and initiated the longest-standing debate in the discipline: the role of Neandertals in human evolutionary history. We report excavations of cave sediments that were removed from the Feldhofer caves in 1856. These deposits have yielded over 60 human skeletal fragments,...