Taxon exclusion mars ‘the origin of embrithopod mammals’

Unfortunately, Gheerbrant, Schmitt and Kocsis 2018
kept Uintatherium out of their study in embrithopod origins. Instead the held on to the invalid genomic geographic clade, Afrotheria.

From the Summary:
“Afrotherian evolution is at the origin of the major radiation of African ungulate-like
mammals, including extant hyrax, elephant, and sea cow orders, which all belong to the
Paenungulata. The paenungulate radiation also includes the extinct order Embrithopoda of uncertain interordinal relationships, which is best known for the giant and strangely specialized Oligocene genus Arsinoitherium. The Ouled Abdoun basin, Morocco, yielded exceptional Paleocene-Eocene fossils documenting the early paenungulate evolution. Here we report two new small Ypresian species, Stylolophus minor n.g., n.sp. and cf. Stylolophus sp., which are the earliest and most primitive embrithopods.”

From the results and discussion:
“Embrithopods are enigmatic placentals with uncertain phylogenetic relationships because of their unusual autapomorphic morphology. They are included in the Paenungulata, but with debated interordinal relationships.”

Adding taxa
in the LRT puts embrithopods in a different clade (see above). Taxon exclusion remains the number one problem in paleontology.

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Shelley SL, Williamson TE and Brusatte SL 2018. The osteology of Periptychus carinidens: A robust, ungulate-like placental mammal (Mammalia: Periptychidae) from the Paleocene of North America. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0200132.