What is a wood-warbler?
Characterizing a monophyletic Parulidae.-All our mtDNA- and c-mos-based reconstructions contained a clade consisting of 19 wood-warbler genera (Figs. 1-4). Those genera have all long been placed in the Parulidae on the basis of nonphylogenetic assessments of morphological similarity, and we therefore termed that clade the “typical parulids”. Three independent lines of evidence support the monophyly of those 19 genera with respect to the other nine-primaried oscines. First, the clade appeared in all mtDNA-based analyses, where it received strong support across a broad spectrum of both taxonomic and nucleotide sampling. Second, it appeared in reconstructions based on nucleotide substitutions in the independent, nuclear-encoded, and much more slowly evolving c-mos gene (Fig. 4). Finally, a one-codon c-mos deletion is shared by all 19 typical parulids genera but is not present in other passerine lineages. Deletions in the avian c-mos gene are rare (Lovette and Bermingham 1999), and that de
