  Since its discovery of the living fossil in 1938, the coelacanth (Latimeria
chalumnae) has generally been considered to be the closest living relative of
the land vertebrates, and this is still the prevailing opinion in most general
biology textbooks. However, the origin of tetrapods has been the subject of
intense debate for decades. The three principal hypothesis (lungfish-tetrapod,
coelacanth-tetrapod, or lungfish-coelacanth sister group) have been proposed.
We used the maximum gene-support tree approach to analyze 43 nuclear genes
encoding amino acid residues, and compared the results of concatenation and
majority-rule tree approaches. The results inferred with three common
phylogenetic methods and three genome-scale approaches consistently rejected
the hypothesis that the coelacanth is the closest living relative of tetrapods.
