BIO153H5 Study Guide - Final Guide: Vascular Plant, Anaerobic Respiration, Non-Vascular Plant
Document Summary
Biologists can categorize species based off of their morphological traits. A lot of classification now a days is based off of molecular characteristics in species dna. All of the characteristics can be used to make a phylogeny evolutionary tree. Systematics is used to make phylogenies: a discipline focused on classifying organisms and determining their evolutionary relationships with one another. Evolutionary history of a group of organisms can be represented using a phylogenetic tree. Organisms that share very similar morphologies or dna sequences tend to be closely related to each other. Phylogeny soon changed into molecular systematics uses data from dna and other molecules to determine evolutionary relationships. Cladistics is kind of like phylogeny but instead, biologists attempt to place species into groups called clades, each of which includes an ancestral species and all of its descendants. Monophyletic: consists of an ancestral species and all of its descendants.
