Appendix 1: List of cladistic characters published on ammonites

The file here provided, is the list of all characters that have been used in cladistic analysis on ammonoids published so far. It constitutes the base of a study which investigates practices in characters establishment. Find here after the abstract of the article that is associated to this file. Cladistics appears as one of the most useful method to reconstruct phylogeny of fossil taxa. However, ammonoids workers tend to sulk this method. The capital step of cladistic analysis is the recognition of homology hypothesis as clue to reconstruct monophyletic clades based on the sharing of derived traits. Previous authors have suggested that coding schemes are usually direct transcription of original taxa description. However, establishing a list of characters (i.e. a matrix taxa /characters) is a very different work compared to a compilation of diagnoses. How morphology is coded in ammonoids? How coding schemes are influenced by traditional descriptions / characters? Here, we review all cladistic analyses of ammonoids published in the literature to compare characters and the way authors have dealt with the treatment of continuous characters, polymorphism and ontogeny. Several barriers are usually invoked to justify that cladistics cannot be applied to reconstruct ammonoids phylogenies. We show that an appropriate use of improvements both on ammonoids' knowledge and cladistics methodology may overcome limitations usually invoked to perform cladistic analysis on ammonoids.

(Table 1) List of studied samples with vestimentiferan tubes

Vestimentiferan tube worms are prominent members of modern methane seep communities and are totally reliant as adults on symbiotic sulphide-oxidizing bacteria for their nutrition. The sulphide is produced in the sediment by a biochemical reaction called the anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). A well-studied species from the Gulf of Mexico shows that seep vestimentiferans 'mine' sulphide from the sediment using root-like, thin walled, permeable posterior tube extensions, which can also be used to pump sulphate and possibly hydrogen ions from the soft tissue back into the sediment to increase the local rate of AOM. The 'root-balls' of exhumed seep vestimentiferans are intimately associated with carbonate nodules, which are a result of AOM. We have studied vestimentiferan specimens and associated carbonates from seeps at the Kouilou pockmark field on the Congo deep-sea fan and find that some of the posterior 'root' tubes of living specimens are enclosed with carbonate indurated sediment and other, empty examples are partially or completely replaced by the carbonate mineral aragonite. This replacement occurs from the outside of the tube wall inwards and leaves fine-scale relict textures of the original organic tube wall. The process of mineralization is unknown, but is likely a result of post-mortem microbial decay of the tube wall proteins by microorganisms or the precipitation from locally high flux of AOM derived carbonate ions. The aragonite-replaced tubes from the Kouilou pockmarks show similar features to carbonate tubes in ancient seep deposits and make it more likely that many of these fossil tubes are those of vestimentiferans. These observations have implications for the supposed origination of this group, based on molecular divergence estimates.