| Popis: |
Recent investigations of darter phylogeny have been based almost entirely on analyses of DNA sequence data. External morphological characters have, at times, been used to infer phylogenetic relationships among species in specific darter clades, but these types of characters are most often used in the discovery and description of darter species. Datasets that comprise more than a dozen discretely coded characters from osteology and myology are surprisingly absent from the investigation of darter phylogeny. It is unknown whether phylogenetic analyses of discretely coded morphological characters can result in resolved hypotheses of darter phylogeny, and whether these inferences would agree with those resulting from phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequence data. This study uses a dataset of 135 discretely coded morphological characters scored for 83 darter species originally presented in an unpublished doctoral dissertation. The phylogenetic utility of this morphological dataset was investigated with bo... |
