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Re: New paper on Neoaves

And echinoderms are crazy things that could have reversed characters.

Sea lilies have gill pouches, if not slits, in their ontogeny, and the "calcichordates" seem to have had true gill slits. I don't believe echinoderms ever had a notochord, though.

Lots of mammalian groups which molecular evidence reject were also
supported by good-looking lists of synapomorphies.  But I do favor
molecular over morphological, so I may be biased.

I favor good molecular analyses over bad morphological analyses. Remember how Whippomorpha suddenly popped out when all the anthracotheres were included in a morphological analysis of the problem for the first time. I also favor good morphological analyses over bad molecular analyses -- we all remember the days when molecular phylogenetics was just laughable, like when molecular analyses supported Haematothermia and similar nonsense, or when the analyses that found Ecdysozoa and Lophotrochozoa for the first time failed to find the monophyly of Mollusca, if not even Bivalvia (I forgot).

I figure even Scrotifera and Pegasoferae will be useful once
paleontology catches up and actually tries to figure out how
so many fossil taxa fit in.  Quite angering it's taking so
long.  Does NOBODY care how xenungulates fit in?

It's quite easy to see why it's taking so long: we've reached the point where a molecular analysis with several genes of several representatives of each of the Eighteen Plus/Minus Zero Extant Orders of Placentalia is much less work than a morphological analysis of the same scope plus tens or hundreds of fossils. Sequencing (from organism to GenBank submission) is a matter of a week or two, you download the other sequences from GenBank, and then you let the computer run for a couple of weeks. That's all.

We'll probably have a complete *Toxodon* mitochondrial genome before we'll have the first serious-sized morphological placental analysis in history. Steps in the direction of the latter are being undertaken, but they are still very far away from that goal. The same holds for Neornithes.