Re: Bootstrap question;

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:13 AM

> David Peters (davidrpeters@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <I mean, dino people are doing essentially the same thing by not including
> parrots and hummingbirds in Cretaceous dino-bird analyses.>

True, but I assume many of the big pterosaur clades you find in that 
analysis haven't been found by anyone else yet. Therefore I wouldn't take 
those clades for granted _for this purpose_ -- because you wouldn't test 
their monophyly this way. (Perhaps this means more separate bootstrap 
analyses of smaller clades.)

> When calibrating whole-mammal mtDNA trees, we tend to use human and
> mouse mitochondria alone to sample eutherians.

I hope nobody really does this. Mice and men are rather closely related 
among placentals, and mice are famous for their extra-fast molecular 
evolution.