Taxonomic sampling and rare genomic changes overcome long-branch attraction in the phylogenetic placement of pseudoscorpions

Long-branch attraction is a systematic artifact that results in erroneous groupings of fast-evolving taxa. The combination of short, deep internodes in tandem with LBA artifacts has produced empirically intractable parts of the Tree of Life. One such group is the arthropod subphylum Chelicerata, whose backbone phylogeny has remained unstable despite improvements in phylogenetic methods and genome-scale datasets. Pseudoscorpion placement is particularly variable across datasets and analytical frameworks, with this group either clustering with other long-branch orders or with Arachnopulmonata (scorpions and tetrapulmonates). To surmount LBA, we investigated the effect of taxonomic sampling via sequential deletion of basally branching pseudoscorpion superfamilies, as well as varying gene occupancy thresholds in supermatrices. We show that concatenated supermatrices and coalescent-based summary species tree approaches support a sister group relationship of pseudoscorpions and scorpions, whe...