Response to “Radiolarian evolution: Analytical challenges in estimating the diversity and origin of Nature’s stars”

Miguel Mendez Sandin, Johan Renaudie, Noritoshi Suzuki, Fabrice Not

We appreciate Daniel Lahr’s concern (Lahr, 2025) on the interpretation and conclusions of our study “Extant diversity, biogeography, and evolutionary history of Radiolaria” (Sandin et al., 2025). Given that some of these comments were already addressed in our original study following reviewers comments and that such issues are well known in the molecular diversity and evolution fields we considered them partly resolved. However, we decided to extend such a reply and discuss it in length here for the curious reader and outsiders or newcomers to the field so that they can tackle these fields with integrity and scientific sounding.