Re: Flamingos and grebes are sistergroups, even if you dislike molecules!

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> No No no. Ecdyosozoa is a figment of the imagination
> of some molecular phylogenists.

Perhaps misalignment, but definitely not imagination! :-)

> Even molecular analysis does not support this clade.

All molecular papers I know do support it... if they are younger than 1997
or so; before that the nematodes were attracted to the base of
Triploblastica by their long branch. But there are morphological characters
just as well. For example, the 3-layered, regularly molted cuticula with
chitinous endocuticle and... somehow special epicuticle (I forgot), and the
peculiar mouth apparatus (introvert, "*Peytoia*" mouthparts of
anomalocaridids, spines of *Aysheaia*, "mouth cone" of pantopods). In
addition, the traditional arguments for an arthropod-annelid relationship
are falling apart. Their segmentation does not seem to be homologous:
panarthropods never have segmented gonads, the acron seems not to exist -- 
e. g. in *Aysheaia* the mouth is terminal (Budd 2002) --, and there's a nice
progression from "homonomously annulated" taxa (*Aysheaia*, Onychophora)
over "heteronomously annulated" ones (the legs are suspended from broader
annuli: "armoured lobopods", *Kerygmachela*) to "segmented" ones (the narrow
annuli between the broad ones disappear: Tardigrada, Arthropoda beginning
with *Opabinia*) (Budd 1996).

> A monophyletic arthropod-vertebrate
> clade is the most likely scenario.

Pardon???

To my knowledge, this has never been suggested in the last... over 50 years.
Did you mean arthropod-annelid?