Fig 1.
Current competing hypotheses of relationships derived from morphological or molecular data for the major starfish clades considered in this paper.
Table 1.
This table summarizes the ability of the various partitions to identify well-established relationship amongst echinoderms other than the Asteroidea.
Fig 2.
Cladograms summarizing inferred asteroid relationships obtained from the different partitions and under different substitution models.
Numbers at nodes indicate Bayesian posterior probability support under CAT-GTR- Γ (bold), Bayesian posterior probability under GTR- Γ (italic bold) and maximum likelihood abayes bootstrap under GTR- Γ (italic). For all the trees except 2a, the branch lengths are estimated under Bayesian GTR- Γ.
Fig 3.
Bayes Factor support for the alterative topologies in the different partitions.
Supports are coded according to [45]. Rates hom. = homogeneous rates partition; comp. hom. = compositionally homogeneous partition; rates+comp. hom. = homogeneous rates and composition partition; rates heter. = heterogeneous rates partition. In this table the red color implies that competing tree is rejected and the darker the red the stronger the evidence for rejection.
Fig 4.
Resultant tree from analysis of the homogenous rates and compositional data set under CAT-GTR-Γ.
Support at the nodes indicates posterior probability under CAT-GTR- Γ (bold), posterior probability GTR- Γ (italic bold) and maximum likelihood abayes bootstrap under GTR- Γ (italic).
Fig 5.
Key morphological characters relevant to asteroid rooting mapped onto our best-supported molecular phylogenetic tree.
1, planktotrophic larval development; ☐ to bipinnaria stage; ■to brachiolaria stage; L—lecithotrophic (no planktotrophic larval stage). 2, suckered tube feet; ☐ absent; ■present. 3, pedicellariae; ☐ simple valves; ■ complex, crossed pedicellarae with basal element. 4, oral frame; ☐ ambulacral; ■ adambulacral. 5, eversible stomach; ☐ absent; ■ present. 6, anus; ☐ absent; ■ present.