However, in trees just two steps longer than minimum length, we find the more 'traditional' arrangement of †Mesonychia positioned close to Cetacea.
The relationships of †Mesonychia and †Indohyus are highly unstable, however - in trees only two steps longer than minimum length, †Mesonychia falls inside Artiodactyla and displaces †Indohyus from a position close to Cetacea.
In alternate trees that are two steps longer, parsimony recovers the same character state reconstructions for †Mesonychia, because this taxon is a close relative of Cetacea in slightly longer trees (e.g., Figure 3B).
The most successful analyses produced trees at least two steps longer than the MLSA tree as judged by the SymD (symmetric distance) metric.
A tree two steps longer than the MLSA tree was recovered using arsinh, BPP, with a binwidth set at norm and excluding the reference taxon.
The closest approximation of the MLSA tree was achieved by the robust spline and loess normalizations (two steps longer by both the Euclidean and correlation distance metrics).
