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Abstract
With fossils found worldwide, Crocodyliformes stands as one of the best documented vertebrates over the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The multiple phylogenetic hypotheses of relationship proposed for the group allow plenty of space for contentious results, partially due to the small overlapping of taxa and disagreeing homology statements among studies. We present two supertrees of Crocodyliformes, based on different protocols of source tree selection, summarising phylogenetic data for the group into a ‘synthetic consensus’. The consensus of the most parsimonious trees, containing 184 terminal taxa, has a remarkably well-resolved branching structure, which may serve as a framework for further macroevolutionary studies. In addition, the IterPCR script was for the first time used in the supertree context to build a reduced consensus tree with the pruning of unstable taxa.
Acknowledgements
The authors are especially grateful to Diego Pol for the critical review of earlier drafts of the manuscript and to Marco Brandalise de Andrade for providing useful discussion on Metriorhynchidae taxonomy. The authors also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. Financial support was provided by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and by the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biologia Comparada, Faculdade de Filosofia Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto–USP. This contribution used TNT ver 1.1, a program freely available, thanks to a subsidy by the Willi Hennig Society.