Liu et al. reply

Jianni Liu (), Michael Steiner, Jason A. Dunlop, Helmut Keupp, Degan Shu, Qiang Ou, Jian Han, Zhifei Zhang and Xingliang Zhang
Additional contact information
Jianni Liu: Early Life Institute, State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Northwest University
Michael Steiner: Freie Universität Berlin
Jason A. Dunlop: Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin
Helmut Keupp: Freie Universität Berlin
Degan Shu: Early Life Institute, State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Northwest University
Qiang Ou: School of Earth Sciences and Resources, China University of Geosciences (Beijing)
Jian Han: Early Life Institute, State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Northwest University
Zhifei Zhang: Early Life Institute, State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Northwest University
Xingliang Zhang: Early Life Institute, State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Northwest University

Nature, 2011, vol. 476, issue 7359, E1-E1

Abstract: Abstract Replying to R. C. P. Mounce & M. Wills Nature 476, 10.1038/nature10266 (2011) ; D. A. Legg et al. Nature 476 10.1038/nature10267 (2011) We welcome the reanalyses by Mounce and Wills 1 and Legg et al. 2 of our paper3, and although we do not fully concur with their conclusions we are pleased that Diania has reopened the debate about key stages in arthropod evolution. We accept that the position of this fossil remains sensitive to parameters of analysis and in the original publication we conceded that our best-supported tree—Diania as sister-group to (Schinderhannes + Euarthropoda)—could be subject to change, and that the ‘walking cactus’ may have a more basal position within the overall framework of the arthropod stem-group. These alternative treatments of our data would seem to confirm this suspicion, although we find the placement of Diania in an unresolved, and extremely basal, polytomy alongside velvet worms, tardigrades and various other lobopodians similarly problematical. We do not doubt that the authors’ results1,2 are statistically well supported, but what do these cladograms tell us about the evolution of the group? Lobopodians are, by their nature, fairly simple and consequently yield few convincing synapomorphies, either with each other or with arthropods in general. As we discovered, this makes scoring a robust data matrix including both lobopodians and arthropods challenging, and we wonder whether the basal polytomies recovered here are simply due to clustering among taxa with few unequivocal apomorphies and/or much missing data.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1038/nature10268

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