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Re: A plea to theropod workers- Code the Taxa in Your Analyses



Brad McFeeters wrote, truncatedly:

 Frustrating=2C yes=2C but why shouldn't it be called a cladogram?  I
 can't = find any dictionary definition of "cladogram" that says you
 have to use a s= pecific method to produce one. =20

Who cares about dictionaries? :-) A cladogram is the result of a cladistic analysis. Not every representation of a phylogenetic hypothesis is a cladogram.

 My pet peeve is basically the opposite of that: all the new papers
 that don= 't explain in the text why certain novel nodes of the
 cladogram exist=2C le= aving ONLY a digital matrix to slog through
 (and I don't own any of the cla= distic software=2C so this involves
 hours of doing reverse-cladistics in my= head... needless to say=2C I
 tend not to bother).  It's as if the results = aren't meant to be of
 interest to any readers except the scientists working= on the next
 cladistic analysis.  How did Choiniere et al. 2010 find Scanso=
 riopterygidae closer to Ornithothoraces than Archaeopteryx?  How did
 Zhou e= t al. 2009 get their novel [[Archaeopteryx [Sapeornis
 [Jeholornis [Zhongjia= nornis [Confuciusornis + Ornithothoraces] ] ]
 ] ] topology?  And so on...

I absolutely agree with this. Most papers are far too short in general... <sigh>