On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 04:45:44AM +0000, Murray Lord wrote:
> It suggests the possibility that the south eastern Australian form
> is more closely related to the north Queensland form than to the
> New Guinea one. If that were to be the case, it would be wrong
> to treat the south eastern and PNG forms are one species and the
> Queensland one is a different species. Either you would have to
> lump all three or split all three.
There is a third option to establish monophyly: treating the PNG
owls as one species and the Australian owls as a second species.
And to complicate matters not every taxonomist agrees that species
need be monophyletic, and many current species are apparently not
monophyletic. This survey found that 17% of bird species examined
appeared non-monophyletic:
http://www.umbc.edu/biosci/Faculty/OmlandLabWebpage/NewPages/papers/FunkOmlandARev.pdf
which plenty of splitting & lumping to come.
Andrew
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