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Re: Whales, not whippos (Probably!!?)


Ken

    This new information makes me even more determined to maintain a
separate Order Mesonychiformes, and (for the time being) coded as sister
group to a cetartiodactyl clade

This might be a bad idea - since there is evidence that the Mesonychia (your Mesonychiformes) is not a natural grouping.


  14  Mesonychiformes
  15  Artiodactyliformes
  _a_ Cetiformes

I beleive you are missing the point of recent research: Artiodactyla and Cetacea are likely monophyletic sister clades, with neither paraphyletic wrt the other.

Why do you rename every clade, adding "formes" to the end of well-established, well-known, well-defined names. This is likely to lead to confusion.


     Even if whales are not sister group to hippos in particular, their
sister group could still be some subclade of artiodactyls.  If they are
sister group to *all* artiodactyls, that could be shown by simply recoding:
16 Cetiformes.    Whether some mesonychiforms should be placed into
Artiodactyliformes still remains to be seen.

Unless they show derived artiodactyl features (e.g. "double-pulleyed astragalus"), then no mesonychid should be put in Artiodacyla.

Therefore, there could still be an
outside chance that some of them are closer to hippos, while others are
closer to some other group of artiodactyls (or mesonychiforms).

This "outside chance" seems astronomicaly remote - unless you have evidence that Cetacea is polyphyletic.

Whippomorphs may be down, but not necessarily out (however
much I personally dislike the name whippomorph).


So do I !

It should be kept in mind
that a diphyletic Cetiformes could possibly explain some of the conflicts
between the molecular and morphological data.

It was my understanding that this was one point (monophyly of Cetacea) on which molecular and morphological data agreed.

ZH




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