Title: Cladograms, phylogenies and the veracity of the conodont fossil record
Abstract: Traditionally, conodont intrarelationships have been reconstructed following the evolutionary palaeontology paradigm, which lacks a formal methodology, renders hypo- theses unrepeatable and takes little account of the imperfect nature of the fossil record. Cladistics provides a prescriptive approach to phylogeny reconstruction and, it is argued, a rigorous method of character analysis that is not incompat- ible with the aims of evolutionary palaeontology. To demon- strate this, we use the Silurian family Kockelellidae as an example of how cladistics can be used to reconstruct relative relationships, and how such hypotheses can be converted to phylogenies. We follow traditional, cladistic approaches to assessing the completeness of the fossil record and find that failure to conduct this within a milieu of absolute, rather than merely relative, relationships leads to spurious infer- ences of gaps in the fossil record. This appears to be a prob- lem that is widespread in theory, but peculiar to species in practice, and parallels the observation that cladograms of fos- sil species tend to exhibit poorer correlation to stratigraphy than do cladograms of fossil higher taxa. We conclude that cladistics provides the only appropriate framework within which to conduct character analysis; phylogenies can be developed from cladograms but very often this additional inferential step is entirely superfluous to the aims of evolu- tionary studies.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 22
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