Giant morphological data matrices are increasingly common in cladistic analyses of
vertebrate phylogeny, reporting numbers of characters never seen or expected before …

Lizards and snakes putatively arose between the early Jurassic and late Triassic; they
diversified worldwide and now occupy many different ecological niches, making them ideal …

Palaeontologists have long employed discrete categorical data to capture morphological
variation in fossil species, using the resulting character–taxon matrices to measure …

Squamate reptiles (snakes, lizards, and amphisbaenians) serve as model systems for
evolutionary studies of a variety of morphological and behavioral traits, and phylogeny is …

The phylogeny of early gnathostomes provides an important framework for understanding
one of the most significant evolutionary events, the origin and diversification of jawed …

A combined analysis of nuclear, mitochondrial and morphological data robustly resolves
snakes as the sister taxon to anguimorph 'lizards'. Analysed in isolation, nuclear DNA …

A phylogeny of tetrapods is inferred from nearly complete sequences of the nuclear RAG-1
gene sampled across 88 taxa encompassing all major clades, analyzed via parsimony and …

The origin of mammals has been characterized as a gradual process, a claim based
primarily on a well-preserved series of extinct nonmammalian synapsids (“mammal-like …

Estimating divergence times on phylogenies is critical in paleontological and neontological
studies. Chronostratigraphically-constrained fossils are the only direct evidence of absolute …

The distinctly non‐random diversity of organismal form manifests itself in discrete clusters of
taxa that share a common body plan. As a result, analyses of disparity require a scalable …