Redrawing the family tree

[redbird]

[rysmiel, livredor, does this seem reasonable and/or startling to you?]

I get the New Scientist rss feed here; this morning, they tossed us another redrawing of the mammalian family tree, which puts horses closest to Carnivora, and close to bats, with cattle closer to whales than horses.
Before cheerfully putting horses closest to carnivora and a distance from cattle, the authors note that

Comprehensive analyses of large collections of DNA sequences mostly reject the conclusions from morphological analyses.

I'm not sure what that does to information derived from fossils.

Reassuringly, marsupials are still an outgroup to the rest of the mammals; the authors seem not to have tested sequences for monotremes, or at least didn't include them on their chart.

Comments

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Oh sorry, was reading lj from a hand held thing and could not see everything very well.

Plane trees are closely related to the lotus, far away from maples and sycamores, which is even weirder!
http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/welcome.html is *good*.