Ancestor-descendant relationships (ADRs), involving descent with modification, are the fundamental concept in evolution, but are usually difficult to recognize. We examined the cladistic relationship between the only reported fossil pygmy right whale, †Miocaperea pulchra, and its sole living relative, the enigmatic pygmy right whale Caperea marginata, the latter represented by both adult and ju...

of randomly distributed fossil horizons. Paleobiology 20:459–469. MAXWELL, W. D., AND M. J. BENTON. 1990. Historical tests of the absolute completeness of the fossil record of tetrapods. Paleobiology 16:322–335. NORELL, M. A., AND M. J. NOVACEK. 1992a. Congruence between superpositional and phylogenetic patterns: Comparing cladistic patterns with fossil records. Cladistics 8:319–337. NORELL, M....

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...

The paper proposes a model for measuring and valuing biodiversity based on evolutionary information, called the phylogenetic tree model. While avoiding the strong restrictions of Weitzman’s [Quart. J. Econ. 107 (1992) 363] “cladistic” approach, the phylogenetic tree model retains much of the mathematical simplicity of the cladistic model. In particular, in the phylogenetic tree model the divers...

The Giant Rat-kangaroos were placed in the Propleopinae by Archer & F\annery (1985) and in the Hypsiprymnodontidae by Ride (1993). Cladistic analysis of Ekaltadeta material from Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland (Wroe, 1996) suggested that a middle to late Miocene dichotomy in Ekaltadeta may have produced two lineages of Plio-Pleistocene Propleopus. indicating polyphyly for Propleopus and pa...

sister groups by any stretch of the imagination. In a very elegant paper, Moroz [2009] reviews the literature, subjects the data to a correct cladistic analysis, and concludes that centralized nervous systems have evolved independently, perhaps as many as seven times. In a particularly striking example, he demonstrates that complex brains have evolved at least three times in molluscans alone. H...