Playing and lightly lost between characters, states, optimizations and trees: almost satisfied

So, the first attempt could have been worst but still was not good, then the game of get things (taxa/characters) in and out began!

The matrix had 41 characters for 22 taxa:

Experiment 1. Without Anypotactus: Take all Anypotactus out would obligate me to found more characters... Not fun... so, I took the one with lowest level of noise (inapplicables) and also would allow to polarize some characters:

The result: one single Most Parsimonious Tree (MPT): L=173; CI=41; RI=63

Anypotactini grouped: Good

Polydrusini -Outgroup- grouped: Good

Anypotactini + Polydrusini -Outgroup- forming a sister clade for Apodrosus: Interesting...

sp. 6 JCG and sp. 13 JCG grouped: Good

Really not convinced about groupings within Apodrosus...

Some character coding had to be changed (reductive coding), some characters became uninformative...

This are images of my notes about that

The game continued until the final matrix was ready -I must confess that it was in part because of the low rate of will reached at that point and because there were discussions, analyses and a presentation remaining to be done before the ESA annual meeting-

This is the last version of the matrix and the single MPT that it produced (L=76; CI=42; RI=69):

The Outgroup has a "rare" distribution (it doesn't matter now)

Anypotactus bicaudatus is the sister taxon for Apodrosus clade... jum... interesting!

sp. 6 JCG and sp. 13 JCG were excluded because there are several characters that group them and I still don't know how to decide if they belong to another different and surely new genus.

Now I'm comfortable with the groupings within Apodrosus!

The names?? uh... let's decide after...