Abstract
Arising from J. Liu et al. , 526–530 (2011)10.1038/nature09704 ; Liu et al. reply Liu et al.1 describe a new and remarkable fossil, Diania cactiformis. This animal apparently combined the soft trunk of lobopodians (a group including the extant velvet worms in addition to many Palaeozoic genera) with the jointed limbs that typify arthropods. They go on to promote Diania as the immediate sister group to the arthropods, and conjecture that sclerotized and jointed limbs may therefore have evolved before articulated trunk tergites in the immediate arthropod stem. The data published by Liu et al.1 do not unambiguously support these conclusions; rather, we believe that Diania probably belongs within an unresolved clade or paraphyletic grade of lobopodians.
Highlights
Liu et al.[1] report analysing their data in PAUP*2 under maximum parsimony and with implied weights[3] using k 5 2, but do not mention any other assumptions
Several of their characters contained inapplicable or gap codings. These appear where a ‘daughter’ character is logically contingent upon the state of a ‘parent’, and cannot be coded when the parent is Fuxianhuia Euarthropoda Leanchoilia Schinderhannes Anomalocaris Laggania Hurdia Opabinia Jianshanopodia Megadictyon Pambdelurion Kerygmachela Luolishania Hallucigenia Onychodictyon Cardiodictyon Miraluolishania Collins’ monster Xenusion Paucipodia Microdictyon Orstenotubulus Tardigrada Diania Aysheaia Hadranax Onychophora Cycloneuralia absent
Character 6 can only be coded in taxa that possess a frontal appendage in the first instance. In morphological analyses such as this, inapplicable states are usually assumed to have no bearing on the analysis, being reconstructed passively in the light of known states
Summary
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