Supertree
From Palaeos
- "Supertrees are a key new way to summarise huge amounts of information and to give us a picture of current opinion - a kind of Domesday book. The methods are not just used to sort out dinosaurs, but any other groups of plants, animals or microbes. It's all part of the "Tree of Life" programme, a large international effort to document all species alive and dead, and to find the one great evolutionary tree that links them all together."
- --Dinosaur Supertree - press release (30th April, 2002) url
- "Supertrees are a key new way to summarise huge amounts of information and to give us a picture of current opinion - a kind of Domesday book. The methods are not just used to sort out dinosaurs, but any other groups of plants, animals or microbes. It's all part of the "Tree of Life" programme, a large international effort to document all species alive and dead, and to find the one great evolutionary tree that links them all together."
In cladistics and phylogenetics, a "supertree" refers to the synthesis of a number of distinct phylogenetic trees and cladograms, combining morphological, molecular, and other data from the different individual phylogenies.
Because supertree construction uses other tree or cladogram topologies rather than the primary data underlying those trees, they can be constructed using all available phylogenetic hypotheses, even those based on incompatible data types, or lacking data entirely. Supertree have produced phylogenies of a number of large taxonomic groups.
However supertree strength is also its weakness, and this approach has been harshly criticised by systematists precisely because it only considers the topology of the source trees, effectively discarding primary data.
A supertree or quasi-supertree approach is also standard with Ascii phylognetic trees.
[edit] References and Links
- Pisani, D., Yates, A. M., Langer, M., and Benton, M. J. 2002. A genus-level supertree of the Dinosauria. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, 269, 915-921. PDF
- Olaf R. P. Bininda-Emonds, "Phylogenetic supertrees: new uses for old phylogenies (and beyond)", abstract (scroll down)
[edit] Credits
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