John A. W. Kirsch

TL;DR: Calibration of the 102-taxon tree and dating of the major dichotomies suggest that no extant marsupial lineage originated before the latest Cretaceous, and that all of them together with most South American and all Australasian fossils should be recognised as a monophyletic group contrasting with a largely Laurasian (if possibly paraphyletic) taxon.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the traditional characters used to unite certain aquatic groups, such as totipalmate feet, foot-propelled diving and long legs, evolved more than once and that organismal change in aquatic birds has proceeded at a faster pace than previously recognized.

TL;DR: Estimates of the rate of divergence among marsupial genomes suggest that the Dromiciops-Diprotodontia split occurred approximately 50 million years ago, well after the establishment of the major clades of marsupials but before deep oceanic barriers prohibited dispersal among Australia, Antarctica, and South America.

TL;DR: Among the outgroups, an apparent sister-group relation of Dermoptera and Primates suggests that flying lemurs do not represent the ancestors of some or all bats; yet the position of Cynocephalus in the tree indirectly strengthens the argument that true flight could have evolved more than once among bats.

TL;DR: DNA-hybridization data on 21 amniotes and two anurans showing that discrimination is obtained among most of these at the class and lower levels is presented, concluding that the evidential meaning of the molecular data is as shown in the trees, but that the topologies may be influenced by a base-compositional bias producing a seemingly slow evolutionary rate in monotremes, or by algorithmic artefacts.