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A clade is by definition monophyletic, meaning that it contains one ancestor which can be an organism, a population, or a species and all its descendants. [note 1] [10] [11] The ancestor can be known or unknown; any and all members of a clade can be extant or extinct.
The term monophyly, or monophyletic, derives from the two Ancient Greek words μόνος (mónos), meaning "alone, only, unique", and φῦλον (phûlon), meaning "genus, species", [4] [5] and refers to the fact that a monophyletic group includes organisms (e.g., genera, species) consisting of all the descendants of a unique common ancestor.
A clade, a monophyletic taxon, is a taxon that consists of the last common ancestor and all its descendants. [31] A clade is characterized by one or more apomorphies: derived character states present in the first member of the taxon, inherited by its descendants (unless secondarily lost), and not inherited by any other taxa. Paraphyly
The flanking red and blue boxes are clades (i.e., complete monophyletic subtrees). A grade is a taxon united by a level of morphological or physiological complexity. The term was coined by British biologist Julian Huxley, to contrast with clade, a strictly phylogenetic unit. [1]
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 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.
A lineage is a single line of descent or linear chain within the tree, while a clade is a (usually branched) monophyletic group, containing a single ancestor and all its descendants. [3] Phylogenetic trees are typically created from DNA, RNA or protein sequence data. Apart from this, morphological differences and similarities have been, and ...
A cladistic definition would define a group based on how closely related its constituents are. Tetrapoda is widely considered a monophyletic clade, a group with all of its component taxa sharing a single common ancestor. [16]