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Taxon A and taxon B are sister groups to each other. Taxa A and B, together with any other extant or extinct descendants of their most recent common ancestor (MRCA), [Note 1] form a monophyletic group, the clade AB. Clade AB and taxon C are also sister groups. Taxa A, B, and C, together with all other descendants of their MRCA form the clade ABC.
One use is as "nearby group" (plesion means close to in Greek), i.e. sister group to a given taxon, whether that group is a crown group or not. [22] The term may also mean a group, possibly paraphyletic , defined by primitive traits (i.e. symplesiomorphies ). [ 23 ]
Phylogenetic nomenclature is a method of nomenclature for taxa in biology that uses phylogenetic definitions for taxon names as explained below. This contrasts with the traditional method , by which taxon names are defined by a type , which can be a specimen or a taxon of lower rank , and a description in words. [ 1 ]
Amborella trichopoda, the most basal extant angiosperm. The flowering plant family Amborellaceae, restricted to New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific, [n 9] is a basal clade of extant angiosperms, [13] consisting of the most species, genus, family and order within the group that are sister to all other angiosperms (out of a total of about 250,000 angiosperm species).
In the diagram, lemurs and lorises are sister clades, while humans and tarsiers are not. A clade A is basal to a clade B if A branches off the lineage leading to B before the first branch leading only to members of B. In the adjacent diagram, the strepsirrhine/prosimian clade, is basal to the hominoids/ape clade. In this example, both ...
In biology, a species complex is a group of closely related organisms that are so similar in appearance and other features that the boundaries between them are often unclear. The taxa in the complex may be able to hybridize readily with each other, further blurring any distinctions.
In evolutionary biology, all life on Earth is theoretically part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry. Phylogenetics is the study of phylogenetic trees. The main challenge is to find a phylogenetic tree representing optimal evolutionary ancestry between a set of species or taxa.
The term paraphyly, or paraphyletic, derives from the two Ancient Greek words παρά (pará), meaning "beside, near", and φῦλον (phûlon), meaning "genus, species", [2] [3] and refers to the situation in which one or several monophyletic subgroups of organisms (e.g., genera, species) are left apart from all other descendants of a unique common ancestor.