Anatomical partitioning has little influence in topologies from Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of morphological data

Morphological data is a fundamental source of evidence to reconstruct the Tree of Life, and Bayesian phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used for this task, along with, or instead of, traditional parsimony approaches. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses require the use of proper evolutionary models and their performance have been intensively studied in the past few years, with significant improvements to our knowledge regarding their performance. Notwithstanding, it was only recently that partitioned models for morphology received attention in studies of empirical data, but a systematic evaluation of its performances using simulations was never performed. Here we evaluate the influence of partitioned models defined by anatomical criterion in the precision and accuracy of consensus tree topologies, evaluating the possible negative effects of under and overpartitioning. For that, we analysed datasets simulated using parameters and properties of two empirical datasets, using Bayesian ph...