Journal of Phylogenetics & Evolutionary Biology

Phylogenetic Morphology in the Genomic Age: A Review

Abstract

Marcia Oliviera*

A phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, is the famous single picture in Darwin's The Origin of Species. In the following century, biologists used similar data to Darwin to reconstruct phylogenies: phenotypic features, particularly morphology. But, beginning in the 1960s, scientists began to use a wider range of genetic and molecular data for phylogenetic inference. Because of the recent exponential increase in our ability to swiftly capture huge amounts of DNA data, phylogenies are now regularly constructed utilising genomic-scale molecular datasets containing hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of base pairs. These massive datasets provide computational hurdles, but they often yield completely resolved and well-supported trees.