Figure 5

Area cladograms. (A) Geological area cladogram of Gondwanan progression (summarized by [48] based on [55] and [56]). Ariine area cladograms based on MP (B) and ML (C) topologies estimated on the combined dataset (see details in Table 1, Additional file 2). (D) Sparks and Smith [48] general area cladogram derived from the area cladograms of cichlids, aplocheiloid killifishes, and rainbowfishes (for particular area cladograms see [[48]: Fig. four]). (E) General area cladogram derived from the component analysis of the four fish groups using either MP (strict consensus of three optimal trees, minimal value = 51) or ML (strict consensus of three optimal trees, minimal value = 32) topologies. Widespread Netuma and Plicofollis were handled under assumption 2 [76–78, 81] by arbitrarily removing all but one area from their distributions (areas used: India-SE Asia for Netuma, Australia-New Guinea for Plicofollis [79, 80]). Letters in parentheses refer to nodes in Figure 3 and Additional file 2.