The relationships among the genera of fungus gnats in mycetophilid subfamily Leiinae are unclear, and monophyly this group is questionable. This monograph provides an extensive phylogenetic study based on morphological data from a large taxonomic sample, including all that have ever been assigned to wide outgroup sampling properly test subfamilial monophyly. A matrix with 128 features 117 termi...

Modified three-taxon analysis (m3ta), a method in which three-taxon statements are produced from a nonadditive binary coding of the original data, has been proposed as a model-free way of assessing monophyly of groups, utilizing the taxic concept of homology. In fact the taxic concept amounts to a model, and, further, one that seems to conflict directly with evolution. M3ta is a type of groupin...

Bombyliidae (5000 sp.), or bee flies, are a lower brachyceran family of flower-visiting flies that, as larvae, act as parasitoids of other insects. The evolutionary relationships are known from a morphological analysis that yielded minimal support for higher-level groupings. We use the protein-coding gene CAD and 28S rDNA to determine phylogeny and to test the monophyly of existing subfamilies,...

The present study is a cladistic analysis of morphological characters focusing on the file of the mandible, the apices of the maxillae, the rupturing device on the maxillae, the internal structures of the mouthparts, and the external morphology of the labial segments as well as the distribution of labial sensilla in true water bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera, infraorder Nepomorpha). The study is b...

The genus Remusatia (Araceae) includes four species distributed in the tropical and subtropical Old World. The phylogeny of Remusatia was constructed using parsimony and Bayesian analyses of sequence data from three plastid regions (the rbcL gene, the trnL-trnF intergenic spacer, and the rps16 intron). Phylogenetic analyses of the concatenated plastid data suggested that the monophyly of Remusa...

Recent phylogenetic analyses, both morphological and molecular, strongly support the monophyly of most insect ‘orders’. On the contrary, the Blattaria, Psocoptera, and Mecoptera are defi nitely paraphyletic (with respect of the Isoptera, Phthiraptera, and Siphonaptera, respectively), and the Phthiraptera are possibly diphyletic. Small relictual subclades that are closely related to the Isoptera...