D3161: Importance of morphology to prove accuracy in phylogenies

One of the most important tools within systematics is morphology, which gives us an idea not only how the organisms use it, but also how these features evolved through time. Unfortunately, most next generation evolutionary biologists are not using morphology as part of their systematics and evolutionary revisionary studies and relying only on the use of molecular phylogenetic analyses, which creates another gap that limits understanding of the whole picture. A clear example of this problem is the family Noctuidae that lack of apomorphies making difficult to determine the placement of many putative noctuids. Therefore, we generated a phylogenomic dataset with 698 loci from 194 species: 129 noctuids, representing all 23 noctuid subfamilies, and 65 outgroup taxa representing all other noctuoid families and all other major lineages of Macroheterocera. In order to demonstrate the importance of morphology in our noctuid phylogenetic results, we also revised multiple species of each of the proposed clades to determine possible apomorphies to differentiate them. As result we found that Noctuidae is paraphyletic, and we proposed five new families with their respective apomorphies. This work constitutes an important advance in the study of one of the most problematic families of Lepidoptera. It also incentivizes to resume the use of morphology to support phylogenies.