Springer and Gatesy [1] give a slightly different hypothesis of the origin of land plants but suggest both that their results 'undermine major conclusions' in our paper [2] and that the coalescent model is not reliable for deep phylogenetic questions such as the origin of land plants. There are three aspects to our response: (i) there are important points of agreement between the two studies (the biological aspect); (ii) the trees obtained by the two studies are very similar (the mathematical aspect); and (iii) there are differences between the methods used (the computational aspect).