[Taxacom] Kingdom Protista (updated coding)

[Kenneth Kinman]

 Dear All,    
       Well to answer Tony's question, I still include the
very same phyla (and exgroups) in my current classification of Kingdom
Protista, but I have done a little bit of recoding of their exact
relationships since July 2009 (as you will see below).      
        Phylum Heterokonta is now coded as sister group
to the alveolate clade (clades 8-10). This makes Chromista doubly
paraphyletic at best (giving rise to both Phylum Rhizaria and the
alveolate clade). However, the final DEATH BLOW to Chromista may have
been delivered by Minge et al., 2009 (Proc. Royal Soc., B, 276:597-604),
whose analysis shows the Cryptophyta-Haptophyta clade as sister group to
the Glaucophyta!!! That would actually make Chromista polyphyletic (and
thus both useless and disinformational). Either way, a separate Kingdom
Chromista is a bad idea. 
         I am not ready to follow Minge et al.'s tree
by transferring Cryptophyta and Haptophyta into an even bigger Plantae
clade. That would be premature (especially in view of molecular evidence
for a "SAR" clade). But note that it would form a Plantae clade even
bigger than that of Cavalier-Smith's (so that would be the fourth in my
list of major different meanings of Plantae). This makes me even more
determined to maintain a Kingdom Metaphyta as an exgroup to these wider
clades of plants.    
         Also a couple of other points. The opisthokont
clade (Choanozoa and its two large exgroups) and Phylum Amoebozoa are
united by some into a Unikonta clade.  I still prefer to keep them as
two separate (but adjacent) clades, and thus paraphyletic with respect
to the Bikonta clade (clades 3-10).  After all, some basal unikonts do
have two centrioles.    
       Also note that I have switched Metamonada and Loukozoa around
(making Metamonada the first excavate clade to split off, instead of
Loukozoa).  This is based on the paper by Hampl et al., 2009 (in Proc.
Acad. Nat. Sciences).  And finally, Tony isn't the only one who has had
problems figuring out what my B, C, D codings mean.  The main clades are
numbered and their subclades are coded by those capital letters (in the
order in which they split off phylogenetically, i.e. Hennigian "combs").
The numbers thus have an implicit letter A, but since this seems to
cause some difficulty, I will henceforth explicitly place the letter A
after those numbers which are subdivided into these subclades (and have
done so below).     
                   -----------Ken Kinman                
 
                  KINGDOM PROTISTA    

   1   Choanozoa%%
 _a_   {{Kingdom EUMYCOTA}} (true fungi)
 _b_   {{Kingdom METAZOA}} 
   2   Amoebozoa
  3A   Metamonada (incl. Parabasalia)
   B   Loukozoa (jakobids and allies)
   C   Percolozoa
   D   Euglenozoa
  4A   Glaucophyta
   B   Rhodophyta
   C   Chlorophyta%
 _a_   {{Kingdom METAPHYTA}} (embryophytes)          
  5A   Cryptophyta
   B   Haptophyta 
   6   Rhizaria
   7  Heterokonta (stramenopiles)
   8  Ciliophora
   9   Dinozoa (or Dinophyta)
  10   Sporozoa             
----------------------------------------------              
NOTES: Clades 5-10 make up 
the "SAR" clade. Clades 4-10 form the photokaryote clade (sensu lato).
And of course, clades 3-10 still form the bikont clade.   Clade 1
(Choanozoa and its two exgroups) form the opisthokont clade of which we
are a part).