| Study and Review Hint for question 7 Review section 14.2, The Phylogeny of Whales. Remember that reversals, while assumed to be rare, do happen and that our assessment of parsimony must take into account more than simply counting the number of evolutionary steps in a given hypothesis. In this particular case, we already know that whales lost their hind limbs; how much less parsimonious is it to suppose that they lost a limb with a pulley-shaped astragalus than a limb with a more generalized ungulate astragalus? |