Biology 1001A Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Autapomorphy, Symplesiomorphy, Synapomorphy
10 May 2016
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Document Summary
Phylogeny which is the description of the evolutionary relationship between living things. We could represent these evolutionary histories with a visual metaphor of a tree. All the living species (8. 7 million) are represented in one of the branches of the trees. Everything on earth is related through common ancestry. Most of the time we cannot look back on fossils, but there are other principles that we can use if we know the characters that are found. We can reconstruct what features the most recent common ancestor would have had. Time moves from the root/base of the phylogeny towards the tips of the phylogeny. Species that we are classifying at the tips of the phylogeny. Each of the branching points are called rendezvous points. Represent speciation events; the point of time where two groups last shared their common ancestor. Some phylogenies convey more information than branching order. It is possible for phylogenies to convey additional information.
