I want thank you all persons who kindly sent their suggestions. Here below a summary of the indications I have got. They are listed anonymously. If someone want receiving the email address for a given report, please, write me at fbarbanera@biologia.unipi.it ----- 1. I have used three different approaches to estimate ancestral area reconstruction. One is S-Diva (statistical dispersal vicariance) of Yu et al. (2010) (http://mnh.scu.edu.cn/S-diva/blog/index.html), which I believe has been superseded by RASP. I used the online version of S-DIVA and it was quite easy to run. You can check my paper Morales-Hojas et al. (2011) Mol. Phyl. Evol. 60. This method allows for phylogenetic uncertainty and can be run with trees from the posterior trees from a MrBayes analysis, and it gives you the probabilities for each ancestral area. The output gives you a tree with the probabilities in each node. I have also used Mesquite to estimate ancestral area with Likelihood. Mesquite is easy to use once you get the hang of it, and the method it uses gives you the probabilities of each state in the node of the phylogeny. And finally you have SIMMAP (http://www.simmap.com/). It estimates the posterior probabilities of character states for each internal node. It has the advantage that it uses a Bayesian approach and allows for uncertainty (you can run it with your posterior trees from MrBayes), but the output is not very user friendly. Nevertheless is not difficult to run and it is quite robust. 2. A good program to do that is MESQUITE. The program can perform this through ML o parsimony analysis. I hope that this information is usefull for you 3. Not sure if you could call these friendly but we have used 3area and Lagrange. Good luck, 4. http://code.google.com/p/lagrange/ 5. One quick suggestion would be the software PhyloMapper: http:// www.evotutor.org/PhyloMapper/ ----- Filippo Barbanera Researcher Department of Biology Protistology-Zoology Unit Via A. Volta, 6 I - 56126 Pisa (PI) Italy Web site: www.biologia.unipi.it Skype: barba_skype room: + 39 050 2211386 lab. : + 39 050 2211343 fax: + 39 050 2211393 Filippo Barbanera