Aim The species-rich family of true toads (Anura: Bufonidae) has been the focus of several earlier studies investigating the biogeography of geographically widespread taxa. Herein, we employ newly developed Bayesian divergence estimate methods to investigate the biogeographical history of this group. Resulting age estimates are used to test several key temporal hypotheses including that the ori...

Practicing phylogenetic systematics as a sophisticated falsification research program provides a basis for claiming increased knowledge of sister species relationships and synapomorphies as evidence for those cladistic propositions. Research in phylogenetic systematics is necessarily cyclic, and the place where the positive shift in understanding occurs is subsequent to discovering the most par...

Classification involves the development of a system of naming clades that can represent evolutionary relationships accurately and concisely. Using the acid-loving heath plants (Ericales) as an example, one can explore the application of different classification methods. The Linnean system of naming retains the traditional hierarchical framework (named ranks) and allows for the application of ma...

Interval Pairwise Comparison Matrices have been widely used to account for uncertain statements concerning the preferences of decision makers. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature, such as multiplicative and fuzzy interval matrices. In this paper, we propose a general unified approach to Interval Pairwise Comparison Matrices, based on Abelian linearly ordered groups. In this ...

Previous attempts to quantify the adequacy between phylogenetic trees (cladograms with a temporal dimension) and the fossil record failed because of inappropriate statistics. A general explanation for this failure is based on a hierarchical perception of the temporal scale. When time is conceived as a hierarchy and not as an arrow, it can be expressed by a pectinate-shaped tree. Comparison betw...

Description: The Alpha Model was proposed by Daniel Ford as a model for phylogenetic trees that describe the genealogical tree relating species. Ford fitted the model to published phylogenies as available on the internet in a database called TreeBASE. An Alpha Model tree is a random rooted binary combinatorial tree Tn with n leaves (cladogram) constructed inductively as follows. For n = 1 and 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...

When the concept of homology is operationalized with synapomorphy and tested with character congruence, homology and homoplasy are treated as a complement relation, a and not-a, respectively. This leaves homoplasy to be defined nominally, something like operational “error” in the inference of homology. In choosing the most severely tested and least disconfirmed cladogram, those errors are minim...

Cover illustration: A cladogram presention of omptin protein sequence alignment.