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The Tree of Life Gets a Makeover
PLoS Genetics Researchers mapped evolutionary relationships among families of seed plants. Darwin called it the “abominable mystery”: the reason for a sudden explosion of diverse flowering plants in the fossil record. Biologists have pondered the issue for years but were hampered by the absence of full studies of some plants and a lack of sophisticated tools for analyzing large genetic data sets.
We traditionally think about the tree of life in terms of Kingdoms: plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc. Genetics has really revolutionized the way we think about the tree of life and, because our classifications should reflect ancestry (that is, who is more closely related to whom), it has actually called into question a lot of our traditional classifications.
Genetics and the tree of life
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