A maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree based on the mitochondrial coding region that included 12 protein-coding genes, two rRNA genes, and 19 tRNA genes from Galliformes. Anserigormes were used as outgroup for rooting. The tree was congruent with those from neighbor joining, minimum evolution, and maximum parsimony methods. Confidence of the groupings was estimated using 1000 bootstrap replications. The Arabic numerals at the base of a node are the bootstrap values derived from the maximum parsimony, neighbor-joining, and minimum-evolution analysis, respectively. Bootstrap values lower than 50% are not shown. Though the tree shows a G. varius relationship that is consistent with the amino acid tree of Nishibori et al. (2005), it is not congruent with those of Helm-Bychowski and Wilson (1986) and Fumihito et al. (1996).