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Re: Senter 2004 - Renesto and Binelli 2005 (long)



Only branching order is informative in a cladogram, not necessarily the
order taxa are in from top to bottom.

Strictly speaking, a cladogram is the outcome of a cladistic analysis, so, in a cladogram, the order from top to bottom or left to right is _never_ informative: a cladogram has no properties except the branching order (and the branch lengths which are usually not displayed in cladograms derived from parsimony analyses), just like how plain text does not have a font, a font size, or a color. It just so happens that PAUP* displays cladograms with the outgroup on top and the rest of the taxa as close to the order in the taxon list as possible, and that people usually _display_ cladograms in such a way that the taxon they are most interested in lies at the bottom (or right).