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The term sister group is used in phylogenetic analysis, however, only groups identified in the analysis are labeled as "sister groups".. An example is birds, whose commonly cited living sister group is the crocodiles, but that is true only when discussing extant organisms; [3] [4] when other, extinct groups are considered, the relationship between birds and crocodiles appears distant.
The crown age of a clade refers to the age of the most recent common ancestor of all of the species in the clade. The stem age of a clade refers to the time that the ancestral lineage of the clade diverged from its sister clade. A clade's stem age is either the same as or older than its crown age. [15] Ages of clades cannot be directly observed.
Clade T is a total group or pan-group, its extant species organized into crown groups C1 and C2.Within clade T are sister clades T1 and C2. Clade T1 is composed of crown group C1 and the stem group S1 which is the set of extinct species that are closer to C1 than any other crown group of extant species.
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).
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The diagram shows three common ways of doing this. For previously defined clades A, B, and C, the clade X can be defined as: The three most common ways to define the name of a clade: node-based, branch-based and apomorphy-based definition. The tree represents a phylogenetic hypothesis of the relations of A, B and C.
Many of these terms are normally used paraphyletically, outside of cladistics, e.g. as a 'grade', which are fruitless to precisely delineate, especially when including extinct species. Radiation results in the generation of new subclades by bifurcation, but in practice sexual hybridization may blur very closely related groupings. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The characteristics used to create a cladogram can be roughly categorized as either morphological (synapsid skull, warm blooded, notochord, unicellular, etc.) or molecular (DNA, RNA, or other genetic information). [7] Prior to the advent of DNA sequencing, cladistic analysis primarily used morphological data.