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2008). I therefore changed the coding of postcranial character 54 to “1” (short) for P.
cookei, which allows the Plesiadapidae to also be represented by a “1.”
For postcranial character 58, “Orientation of spinous process on axis,” Bloch et al.
(2007) coded Plesiadapidae with the “0” state, indicating a “caudal” orientation. This
coding was based on the axis of P. cookei (UM 87990). My study of this specimen
suggests to me that it is broken cranially (see Chapter 4), such that whether or not there
was a cranial orientation to the process is unknown. However, a specimen of N.
intermedius (USNM 442229) retains a prominent, cranially-oriented spine. Thus, I recoded
this character for Plesiadapidae with the “1” state, indicating a “cranial”
orientation.
A heuristic search of the edited Bloch and Silcox (2006) matrix resulted in only
two trees, instead of three (Fig. 5.3). One of these trees (Fig. 5.3A) matched one of the
MP trees of Bloch and Silcox (2006: p.26, fig. 23C), with Carpolestidae, Plesiadapidae
and Paromomyidae forming successive outgroups to Euprimates. However, the other MP
tree has the inverse order for these three groups (Fig. 5.3B). That is, paromomyids form
the sister of Euprimates. This means that the consensus tree (Fig. 5.3C) has less
resolution than that of Bloch and Silcox (2006). The tree length (TL) decreased from the
original results and the consistency index (CI) and the retention index (RI) increased
(Table 5.6).
Analysis of the modified Bloch et al. (2007) matrix yielded the same results as the
analysis of the original matrix (Fig. 5.3D). TL decreased and CI increased (Table 5.6).
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