The relationships of Waimanu manneringi, and its slightly younger sister taxon Waimanu tuatahi, have also been evaluated in several phylogenetic analyses of morphological, and combined molecular and morphological datasets, and are consistently recovered as the basal-most members of Sphenisciformes [85], [111], [112].
More detailed information on characters and corresponding references are found in Additional file 5. We report the results of the maximum likelihood (ML) and parsimony (MP) analyses of the morphological dataset alone, and compare these results to those of the ML analysis of combined morphological and molecular data.
Critical Principal Component (PC) axes and the morphological attributes that influence critical PC axes most strongly were identified by permuting the original morphological dataset 1000 times and performing a phylogenetic PCA on each of these permuted datasets.
We followed the procedures of Smith [ 43] to code additional genera of avian Ischnocera (Additional file 1) for a morphological dataset of 138 adult and nymphal characters (Additional file 2).
The choice of Recent taxa for inclusion in this dataset is based on maximizing the overlap of the morphological dataset with the 19 nuclear and 3 mitochondrial gene dataset used by [ 9].
Our morphological dataset used wild-caught benthic and limnetic fish, while our kinematic dataset used F1 benthics and limnetics raised in outdoor experimental ponds designed to mimic the natural habitat of Paxton Lake.
Blomberg's K and Pagel's λ statistics of phylogenetic signal and standard deviation for the damselfish morphological dataset in the posterior distributions of phylograms and chronograms.
nov. The large morphological dataset provides information on the diversity and distribution of morphological traits in Ditrysia, and can be used in future research on the evolution of these traits, in identification keys and in identification of fossil Lepidoptera.
Phenotypic variation in our morphological dataset is affected by both genetics and environment, whereas fish from the kinematic dataset would have been less influenced by environment.
MAW conceived the study, compiled the morphological dataset, performed the tests for phylogenetic signal and congruence of partitions, did the leaf stability and taxon impact analyses, performed the parsimony analyses, wrote the paper and prepared figures.
