Data from: Cladograms, phylogenies and the veracity of the conodont fossil record

Traditionally, conodont intrarelationships have been reconstructed
following the evolutionary palaeontology paradigm, which lacks a formal
methodology, renders hypotheses unrepeatable and takes little account of
the imperfect nature of the fossil record. Cladistics provides a
prescriptive approach to phylogeny reconstruction and, it is argued, a
rigorous method of character analysis that is not incompatible with the
aims of evolutionary palaeontology. To demonstrate this, we use the
Silurian family Kockelellidae as an example of how cladistics can be used
to reconstruct relative relationships, and how such hypotheses can be
converted to phylogenies. We follow traditional, cladistic approaches to
assessing the completeness of the fossil record and find that failure to
conduct this within a milieu of absolute, rather than merely relative,
relationships leads to spurious inferences of gaps in the fossil record.
This appears to be a problem that is widespread in theory, but peculiar to
species in practice, and parallels the observation that cladograms of
fossil species tend to exhibit poorer correlation to stratigraphy than do
cladograms of fossil higher taxa. We conclude that cladistics provides the
only appropriate framework within which to conduct character analysis;
phylogenies can be developed from cladograms but very often this
additional inferential step is entirely superfluous to the aims of
evolutionary studies.