Study Suggests That Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong
Published:06 Jun.2022 Source:University of Bath
New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study, published in Communications Biology, shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.
Since Darwin and his contemporaries in the 19th Century, biologists have been trying to reconstruct the "family trees" of animals by carefully examining differences in their anatomy and structure (morphology).