The diversity of the Polytrichopsida—a review (original) (raw)

When fossils are sparse and the lineages studied are very divergent morphologically, analyses based exclusively on morphology may lead to conflicting and unexpected hypotheses. Through integration of data from conservative genes/gene regions the terminals including these data can anchor or constrain the search, thereby practically circumscribing the search space of the combined analyses. In this study, we revisit the phylogeny of a highly divergent group of mosses, class Polytrichopsida. We supplemented the morphological matrix by adding sequence data of the nuclear gene 18S, chloroplast genesrbcL andrps4, plus the mitochondrial genenad5. For the phylogenetic analyses we used parsimony as the optimality criterion. Analyses that included all the terminals resulted in one most parsimonious tree with a clade comprised ofAlophosia azoricaand the fossilMeantoinea alophosioidesrepresenting the basal-most lineage. Analyses with different outgroup sampling produced the same topology for mos...