Abstract. Historically, characters from early animal development have been a potentially rich source of phylogenetic information, but many traits associated with the gametes and larval stages of animals with complex life cycles are widely suspected to have evolved frequent convergent similarities. Such convergences will confound true phylogenetic relationships. We compared phylogenetic inferences based on early life history traits with those from mitochondrial DNA sequences for sea stars in the genera Asterina, Cryptasterina, and Patiriella (Valvatida: Asterinidae). Analysis of these two character sets produced phylogenies that shared few clades. We quantified the degree of homoplasy in each character set when mapped onto the phylogeny inferred from the alternative characters. The incongruence between early life history and nucleotide characters implies more homoplasy in the life history character set. We suggest that the early life history traits in this case are most likely to be misleading as phylogenetic characters because simple adaptive models predict convergence in early life histories. We show that adding early life history characters may slightly improve a phylogeny based on nucleotide sequences, but adding nucleotide characters may be critically important to improving inferences from phylogenies based on early life history characters.Additional key words: total evidence, modes of development, life history, mtDNA, AsteroideaThe choice of characters for use in phylogenetic analyses is an important and contentious issue in animal phylogenetics. Since Haeckel (1866), phenotypic characters from the earliest parts of the life cycle (such as the morphological forms of planktonic larvae) have been viewed as a potentially rich source of phylogenetic information. However, even in the early 20 th century, there was growing skepticism of the utility of early life history characters for tracing evolutionary relationships (e.g., Conklin 1928; Gould 1977). The subsequent growth of larval ecology as a research discipline led to renewed interest in the phylogenetic history of embryological and larval diversity, with a sharp focus on the study of early life history characters expressed during sexual reproduction or during larval development before metamorphosis to the adult form (McHugh & Rouse 1998). Molecular phylogenetic studies of taxa that include species with diverse early a Author for correspondence. E-mail: michael.hart@dal.ca b Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, SimonFraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada life histories have suggested the evolution of convergent similarities in early life history characters such as egg size, type of parental care, offspring dispersal ability, larval morphology, and fertilization ecology (Hart 2000). Many of these characters reflect functional adaptations of a complex life cycle in which individuals sequentially inhabit planktonic and benthic habitats: the similarities in character states could represent shared ancestral states as a result ...