Figure 1.

Lengths of manual alignments used to infer the phylogeny of planktonic foraminifera. Summary of planktonic foraminifera molecular phylogenies based on the 3’ fragment of the SSU rDNA gene. Almost one half of the ~1000 bp in the analysed fragment are lost when attempting to align “unambiguously” across the entire clade. The remaining variable regions clearly contain phylogenetically useful information, as can be seen by the longer alignments produced for subclades including only selected species. This phylogenetic information is lost when aligning across the three major clades of planktonic foraminifera, or when the alignment includes benthic outgroups. Data sources (in chronological order): 1997, Darling et al² [7], Huber et al⁴ [8], de Vargas et al³ [3]; 1999, Darling et al⁷ [5]; 2000, Darling et al⁹ [4]; 2001, Stewart et al¹¹ [3], de Vargas et al¹⁰ [16,17]; 2002, de Vargas et al⁶⁹ [9]; 2003, Darling et al⁷⁰ [10,11,18]; 2004, Darling et al⁵¹ [19,20]; 2006, Darling et al⁵⁴ [2,21]; 2007, Darling et al⁷¹[22]; 2008, Kuroyanagi et al⁷² [12], Ujiié et al⁷³ [1]; 2009, Aurahs et al⁷⁴ [13,14,15].