“…The present model was evaluated with information obtained from 11 Doctoral theses and 14 Master's dissertations developed at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa (Barbosa, 1978;Margon, 1981;Galvão, 1991;Estrada, 1996;Gesualdi Júnior, 1999;Resende, 1999;Backes, 2003;Magalhães, 2003;Miranda, 2005;and Obeid, 2005), Universidade Estadual Paulista (Arrigoni, 1995;Henrique, 2002;Leão, 2002;Mendes, 2003;and Faturi, 2005), Universidade de São Paulo (Pereira, 2002;Putrino, 2002;Aferri, 2003;and Oliveira, 2004), Universidade Federal de Lavras (Fontes, 1993), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Languidey, 1975;and Pacola, 1977) and Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (Bulle, 2000;Fernandes, 2004;and Almeida, 2005), and also four articles published at the Revista Brasileira de Zootecnia Chizzotti et al, 2005;Silva et al, 2005;Pereira et al, 2006). From those data, 275 were related to individual observations obtained at the appendix of the theses and dissertations,…”