Mesquite 1.0 has been released formally at http://mesquiteproject.org
Mesquite is open-source software for evolutionary analysis. It has modules for phylogenetic interpretations of character evolution (likelihood, parsimony, comparative methods), simulations (sequence evolution, coalescence, speciation), multivariate analysis (PCA, CVA), and other analyses (e.g., parametric bootstrap, compositional bias, tree comparisons, randomizations, cluster analysis). Molecular, morphological and continuous-valued data can be edited and analyzed. Its interface is graphical and interactive, with charts and phylogenetic visualizations. Mesquite operates on Windows, Linux/Unix, and the Mac OS (9 and X). An outline of features (with screenshots) is given at http://mesquiteproject.org/mesquite/features.html The MORPHOMET community might be particularly interested in the features for continuous-valued data. Mesquite and the included Rhetenor package by Dyreson & Maddison have both standard multivariate analyses (PCA, CVA) and phylogenetically-oriented calculations (reconstruction of ancestral states & landmarks, plotting trees in character space, "Evolutionary" PCA, and Brownian motion simulations of character evolution). The separately-available PDAP package by Midford et al. analyzes phylogenetic correlations via Felsenstein's independent contrasts. We welcome your feedback about how Mesquite can be improved for use in both research and teaching. Mesquite's features for geometric morphometrics are in their infancy, but we hope to improve them by our own efforts, by inviting others to write modules, and by linking Mesquite to other programs. If you might be interested in building your own modules for Mesquite, or contributing to the coding of the core Mesquite classes, please contact us. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Wayne Maddison David R. Maddison Departments of Zoology and Botany Department of Entomology University of British Columbia University of Arizona Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Tucson, AZ 85721 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mesquite: http://mesquiteproject.org MacClade: http://macclade.org Tree of Life: http://tolweb.org == Replies will be sent to list. For more information see http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph/morphmet.html.
