BMC Evolutionary Biology BioMed Central Research article Open Access A higher-level MRP supertree of placental mammals Robin MD Beck*1,2,3, Olaf RP Bininda-Emonds4,5, Marcel Cardillo1, Fu- Guo Robert Liu6 and Andy Purvis1 Address: 1Division of Biology, Imperial College London, Silwood Park campus, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK, 2Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, UK, 3School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia, 4Lehrstuhl für Tierzucht, Technical University of Munich, 85354 Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany, 5Institut für Spezielle Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie mit Phyletischem Museum, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany and 6Department of Zoology, Box 118525, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611-8552, USA Email: Robin MD Beck* -
[email protected]; Olaf RP Bininda-Emonds -
[email protected]; Marcel Cardillo -
[email protected]; Fu-Guo Robert Liu -
[email protected]; Andy Purvis -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 13 November 2006 Received: 23 June 2006 Accepted: 13 November 2006 BMC Evolutionary Biology 2006, 6:93 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-6-93 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/6/93 © 2006 Beck et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The higher-level phylogeny of placental mammals has long been a phylogenetic Gordian knot, with disagreement about both the precise contents of, and relationships between, the extant orders.