Understanding a phylogeny is a lot like reading a family tree. The root of the tree represents the ancestral lineage, and the tips of the branches represent the descendants of that ancestor.
Phylogeny helps scientists organize species or other groups in ways that represent our understanding of how they evolved from common ancestors. In a phylogenetic tree, or cladogram, the species or groups of interest are found at the tips of lines referred to as the tree's branches.
insider.si.edu: Deep metazoan phylogeny : the backbone of the tree of life. new insights from analyses of molecules, morphology, and theory of data analysis / edited by J. Wolfgang Wägele ...
Deep metazoan phylogeny : the backbone of the tree of life. new insights from analyses of molecules, morphology, and theory of data analysis / edited by J. Wolfgang Wägele ...
It was often expressed as " ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", i.e. the development of a single organism during its lifetime, from germ to adult, successively mirrors the adult stages of successive ancestors of the species to which it belongs.
Fundamental to phylogeny is the proposition, universally accepted in the scientific community, that plants or animals of different species descended from common ancestors.
Phylogeny is used to represent the evolutionary history of species observed through time, and is thus one of the most important entities in evolutionary biology (Hillis et al., 1993; Swofford et al., 1996; Avise, 2000; Ma et al., 2000).
The meaning of PHYLOGENY is the evolutionary history of a kind of organism.