A clade or monophyletic group is easy to identify visually: it is simply a piece of a larger tree that can be cut away from the root with a single cut (Figure 4a).

Most of the 470-million-year history of plants on land belongs to bryophytes, pteridophytes and gymnosperms, which eventually yielded to the ecological dominance by angiosperms 90 Myr ago1,2,3.

In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar ...

Cestodes (tapeworms) form a monophyletic group of parasitic Platyhelminthes (flatworms), and include over 5200 described species. Adult cestodes reproduce in the digestive tract of vertebrates, but ...