The Phylogeny Of Monster Hunter

A side blog for a side project, where I try to apply science to fantasy.  Not a guildmarm roleplay blog but might as well be. Icon by @koyoriin

[mh-phylogeny]

These are my resuts from plugging the information from this post into Mesquite, a free open source program. Since it’s not web-based it was more difficult to get good screencaps, so apologies. 

(Juicy deets below the cut)

The minor change I made is that Duramboros now counts as plated, based on closer consultation of renders. 

You can especially see so on the tail and shoulders. The presence of horns is also more coherent with plating. 

Both trees represent the same phylogeny as the previous post, just tracking different traits. The first tree shows that plated/unplated coincides with short/long faced traits. This is nice for our treelength, but also suggests some missing evidence within the Brute wyvern group. My personal theory is that brute wyverns are derivative of bird wyverns, but we’ll see how the evidence turns out. The second tree shows that herbivory evolves only once in this tree, which is tidy. (As for the issue about Uragaan eating rocks- certain lore makes me think its source of nutrients is plants, as well as lichen that grow on rocks. I might discuss this later). 

The one thing I really don’t like about this is that three or more fingered hands evolved twice separately; in the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of Barroth and Glavenus, and in Anjanath. The low probability of developing an extra finger but relatively few other changes, to me introduces the thought of polyphyly. That is, Brute wyverns are not descended from a single MRCA that would also be a Brute wyvern, but instead are made up of two or more convergently evolved lines. 

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I think this is the lowest tree length I could get (total number of times that a new trait had to evolve). There were several solutions but this being one of them supports it as the correct phylogeny (assuming monophyly). 

[mh-phylogeny]

UPGMA Test

I used a binary difference chart and DendroUPGMA to run some basic tests. I chose to use the Brute Wyvern classification given by the games lore for two reasons:

It is small with only 7 members, excluding subspecies and other variants (I may include these later).

The members are relatively similar, so although it may be a paraphyletic group we can assume it is not a polyphyletic group. 

(Results below the cut)

The data I input looked like this:

And the output looked like this:

The numbers here show amount of difference between two taxa.

This is the resulting dendrogram. It conforms fairly well to my expectations, with Deviljho and Anjanath, or what we could call long-faced brute wyverns (I’ll make up cool scientific names sometime) in their own group, and what we could call short-faced or plated brute wyverns grouped together. Obviously, this just takes the classification “Brute wyvern” for granted and doesn’t consider that it may be a paraphyletic or polyphyletic group. However, it shows pretty good results, especially for analysis of only 6 characters. My next tests will look into larger and more diverse groups (flying and bird wyverns) as well as more breadth and depth of characters (including possibly drops and attacks).

[mh-phylogeny]

Introduction

Because I’m a hopeless evolutionary biology nerd, I thought it would be fun to do a phylogeny of all the monster hunter monsters. Essentially, plotting which monsters are most related, and what taxa and families we can create with confidence. I have access to a lot of phylogeny software to do Weighted (and Unweighted) Pair Group Method with Arithmetic mean analysis (WPGMA/UPGMA), as well as cladistics. 

My end goal will be to follow best scientific practice and put together a full phylogeny as well as Linnean organization of the monsters. I’m limiting myself to main series games since it’s what I’m familiar with. I’ll try and post updates, documentation and maybe some more formal, report-like content if I reach a big milestone.