Re: Darwin's young dead pet from Messel

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

> There is a cladogram, but it's buried in the supplementary material. It 
> includes three genera.

No, this is not a cladogram. "Cladogram" does not mean "phylogenetic 
hypothesis represented as a branching diagram with thin, straight lines and 
sharp angles", it means "the outcome of a phylogenetic analysis" -- and no 
such analysis was done.

The three taxa aren't three genera, they are "Sterpsirrhini" (sic!!!) (those 
closer to the lemurs than to us), *Darwinius*, and Haplorhini (those closer 
to us than to the lemurs -- which means that *Darwinius* is a member of it 
on that tree, not its sister-group, which is by definition Strepsirhini).

What the authors did was to make a list of strepsirhine and haplorhine 
character states and check if *Darwinius* has them. That's all. The effects 
that adding this taxon to any data matrix would have were not explored; 
_there is no data matrix_. The authors created a phylogenetic hypothesis and 
_did not test it_. Even for PLoS ONE standards, I don't know how to call 
this other than a failure of peer review.

While I am at it, you can tell that that particular tree is not a cladogram 
_by just looking at it_. That's because it contains just three taxa. There 
is only one possible unrooted tree for three taxa, and thus only one 
possible rooted tree for three taxa if one of them is the outgroup. A 
phylogenetic analysis is neither necessary nor possible in this trivial 
case.