This paper identifies and discusses features of the classification of mammals that are relevant to the bibliographic classification of the subject. The tendency of zoological classifications to change; the differing sizes of groups of species; the use zoologists make of groupings other than taxa; and the links in zoology between classification and nomenclature, are identified as key themes the ...

Lexical items in the vocabulary of a language undergo dramatic changes over time, explaining the mechanisms that cause this change has been an important topic for the cognitive sciences. One particular focus for researchers has been understanding the dynamics of change in word forms. The rate (or half-life) at which word forms change over time varies greatly, and corpus-based cladistic studies ...

For several historical reasons discussed herein, until recently the absolute temporal dimension of many phylogenetic trees has been relatively ignored whereas the branching (cladistic) aspect typically has been the focus of most phylogeny-reconstruction efforts. This unfortunate neglect of “timetrees” is now being remedied, as this book will attest. Many scientifi c benefi ts can emerge from su...

The vertebrate fauna of the West Indies (1262 species) exhibits high levels of endemism and has a taxonomic composition characteristic of more isolated oceanic islands. Many groups that are widespread on the mainland are absent in the islands, and some of those present are characterized by large adaptive radiations. The growing fossil record of West Indian vertebrates, including mid-Tertiary am...

Identity is a central concept in the social sciences. In this study, we present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on participant social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member (as opposed to an outgroup member) they show a 47% increase in charity concerns when they have a higher payoff and a 93% decrease in envy wh...

A consensus is emerging that continuous (or metric) measures can be useful in phylogenetic systematics. Many of the methods for coding such characters, however, employ elements that are arbitrary and therefore should be excluded from use in cladistic analysis. The continued use of such potentially inappropriate methods can be attributed to either their simplicity or the availability of computer...

SUMMARY RadCon is a Macintosh program for manipulating and analysing phylogenetic trees. The program can determine the Cladistic Information Content of individual trees, the stability of leaves across a set of bootstrap trees, produce the strict basic Reduced Cladistic Consensus profile of a set of trees and convert a set of trees into its matrix representation for supertree construction. AVA...

A new genus and species of hipposiderid bat is described from an early Miocene cave deposit (Bitesantennary Site) in the Riversleigh World Heritage fossil property, northern Australia. Eight hipposiderid genera are now recorded from Riversleigh’s Miocene sediments: Hipposideros, Brachipposideros, Rhinonycteris, Riversleigha, Xenorhinos, Miophyllorhina, Archerops and Brevipalatus gen. nov. The n...

Stein Jr., W.E., 1987. Phylogenetic analysis and fossil plants. Rev. Palaeobot. Palynol., 50:31 61. This paper presents a perspective on the relat ionship between cladistic methods and the study of fossil plants. Paleobotany has been slow in evaluat ing the potent ial of these and other explicit methods compared to other branches of systematics. However, the unique or part icular ly difficult p...