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The idea of a tree of life arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being).Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
The Open Tree of Life is an online phylogenetic tree of life – a collaborative effort, funded by the National Science Foundation. [2] [3] The first draft, including 2.3 million species, was released in September 2015. [4] The Interactive graph allows the user to zoom in to taxonomic classifications, phylogenetic trees, and information about a ...
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 ]
The results are a phylogenetic tree—a diagram setting the hypothetical relationships between organisms and their evolutionary history. [4] The tips of a phylogenetic tree can be living taxa or fossils, which represent the present time or "end" of an evolutionary lineage, respectively. A phylogenetic diagram can be rooted or unrooted.
The science that tries to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and thus discover clades is called phylogenetics or cladistics, the latter term coined by Ernst Mayr (1965), derived from "clade". The results of phylogenetic/cladistic analyses are tree-shaped diagrams called cladograms ; they, and all their branches, are phylogenetic hypotheses.
Phylogenetic trees are a subset of phylogenetic networks. Phylogenetic networks can be inferred and visualised with software such as SplitsTree, [4] the R-package, phangorn, [5] [6] and, more recently, Dendroscope. A standard format for representing phylogenetic networks is a variant of Newick format which is extended to support networks as ...
Just as a map is a scaled approximation of true geography, a phylogenetic tree is an approximation of the true complete evolutionary relationships. For example, in a full tree of life, the entire clade of animals can be collapsed to a single branch of the tree. However, this is merely a limitation of rendering space.