The Early Branching Group of Orbiniida Sensu Struck et al., 2015: Parergodrilidae and Orbiniidae

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Meca and co-authors present a particularly well written and comprehensive review of Orbiniida, covering topics ranging from molecular phylogeny to distribution to ecology. Figure quality is outstanding (Fig. 7 coloration stands out). Authors are clearly experts in the field, and have put together a quality document encompassing a large body of disparate work that will be a valuable resource, and will help guide future studies. It is a rarity to review a draft of this precision and quality, it can be published as presented. An Abstract would be a constructive addition, but perhaps this is not the journal style...

Author Response

An abstract has been added together with a few keywords as suggested by the reviewer 1. No more changes are suggested by this reviewer.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear editor, dear authors, 

The article "The early branching group of Orbiniida sensu Struck et al., 2015: Orbiniidae and Parergodrilidae" by Miguel A. Meca, Anna Zhadan and Torsten Hugo Struck is a detailed review of the annelid group Orbiniida, including a wealth of information on their morphology, distribution and systematics, amongst others.

The article is well written in general, although there is a discrepancy between the first and the last part of the manuscript (Parergodrilidae vs. Orbiniidae), with the first part offering detailed insight into the family, yet also having some repetitive sections, which could possibly be avoided or reduced by using subheading such as used in the second part. Thus said, although the beginning is more lengthy than the latter section, it also gives a good impression about the history of this annelid family, which should be maintained, but possibly shortened or summarized in some parts. 

I have commented more details in the attached PDF of the manuscript - nothing much, only small suggestions, questions, ..., which I hope will be useful for the authors, who already provided a really close-to-be-finished work. Some of the major comments are around consistency when using references (et al. is sometimes written in italics and sometimes not), abbreviations or references to personal observation/communication (pers. comm., personal comm., ...). Especially in the figure legends species names are often not written in italics – I tried to point those issues out, but I am not sure I managed everywhere (I do absolutely love the figure highlighting the chaetae, it is so informative and nice!). The figures also showed the difference between the description of the two families: The panel labels (A, B, C, …) are largely inconsistent between especially the first three or four figures – while this is not a huge issue, the paper would look even better once these parts are improved.

Overall I absolutely enjoyed readings this great article and I very much want to see it published with Diversity! I definitely recommend this article for publication after (very) minor revision!

Author Response

The changes suggested by the reviewer 2 in the PDF file has been incorporated to the new version of the manuscript.