Phylogeny of the great cats with fossil taxa and missing characters

This morphological study reconstructed relationships among the pantherine cats while explicitly incorporating fossil taxa and testing how missing data affect tree inference. Working from cranial and skeletal characters, the author probed the placement of clouded leopards and the snow leopard and compared morphological signal with molecular results. The paper is notable for confronting a recurring challenge in felid systematics: morphology-based trees often conflict with DNA-based ones, partly because of convergence and partly because rapid radiation leaves few diagnostic characters. By including extinct forms, the study aimed to bridge fossil and living diversity, which is important for calibrating divergence dates. It represents the morphological side of the debate that molecular phylogenetics increasingly dominated, and it is valuable for understanding how anatomical evidence is weighed against genetic data.