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level cladogram. A total of 33 cranial characters and 65 postcranial characters are
optimized (Tables 5.3, 5.4A-C). The optimization represents only a “downpass” step of
the total optimization exercise (e.g., Wiley et al., 1991) because the ancestral state cannot
be assumed as required for the “uppass” step. Furthermore, inclusion of the sister taxon
to the Plesiadapidae cannot be used to help reconstruct the ancestral condition of the
family because this would allow results of the Bloch et al. (2007) cladistic analysis to
influence the reconstruction. Instead, the ancestral node for the Plesiadapidae is left
polymorphic for characters that cannot be reconstructed as monomorphic through a
“majority rules” criterion on the “downpass” step of the optimization.
Cladistic analysis of matrices using higher level taxa - The character matrix of
Bloch et al. (2007) was downloaded from Morphobank.geongrid.org. The character
matrix of Bloch and Silcox (2006) was obtained from M. Silcox. The Bloch and Silcox
(2006) matrix simply represents the cranial partition of the Bloch et al. (2007) matrix. I
re-analyze it here to assess the affect of new cranial material alone on existing
phylogenetic hypotheses.
I examined and edited the matrices using the software Mesquite. The matrices
were subjected to parsimony analysis using the software Nona (Nixon, 1999-2002) in
WinClada (Goloboff, 1999). Parsimony analyses were heuristic searches of 20,000
iterations.
More specifically, I first reanalyzed the matrices of Bloch and Silcox (2006) and
Bloch et al. (2007) without revising any character codings. I did this to confirm that I
could reproduce the results of the original authors. I was successful at recovering the
exact same topologies. Next, I changed codings for the Plesiadapidae O.T.U. in both
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