Digest: Resolving phylogenomic conflicts in characiform fishes†

How can taxonomists best resolve the challenge of curating and analyzing large phylogenomic datasets that produce incongruent but highly supported topologies? Betancur-R et al. used a recently established hypothesis-testing procedure on a large dataset of genes and species to study the evolutionary relationships of characiform fishes, finding that past conclusions of non-monophyly may have been problematic and establishing monophyly with high confidence. The new findings highlight the importance of using dense taxon sampling to resolve conflicting relationships with phylogenomic data.