Confused about placement of ancestral species in phylogeny…
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Confused about placement of ancestral species in phylogeny
So for some reason I'm having trouble understanding where ancestral species go in a phylogenetic tree. Each node represents a common ancestor to all its descendants, and that common ancestor belongs to some species, but that species also has to be separately represented at the tip of its own clade, right? So every ancestral species is basically represented twice in a tree? For some reason that confuses me, like species can only be represented at the tips of the tree but some of those tips represent nodes way further up the tree. Is there any way to tell from a diagram alone which species or group belongs to a node? Like in this diagram of Canidae https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Wang_Borophagine_Construct.png?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original I know that some member of Hesperocyon is considered the ancestor of the Borophagine/Canine clade. Is there any way to tell from the diagram though? Like, in this diagram if you trace the sister taxa Hesperocyoninae all the way to the left you get the ancestor, but is that always the case? Is the left-most tip always the common ancestor of the sister taxa if it's known? Or can you just not tell which group belongs to that node from the diagram?
#animals
So for some reason I'm having trouble understanding where ancestral species go in a phylogenetic tree. Each node represents a common ancestor to all its descendants, and that common ancestor belongs to some species, but that species also has to be separately represented at the tip of its own clade, right? So every ancestral species is basically represented twice in a tree? For some reason that confuses me, like species can only be represented at the tips of the tree but some of those tips represent nodes way further up the tree. Is there any way to tell from a diagram alone which species or group belongs to a node? Like in this diagram of Canidae https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Wang_Borophagine_Construct.png?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original I know that some member of Hesperocyon is considered the ancestor of the Borophagine/Canine clade. Is there any way to tell from the diagram though? Like, in this diagram if you trace the sister taxa Hesperocyoninae all the way to the left you get the ancestor, but is that always the case? Is the left-most tip always the common ancestor of the sister taxa if it's known? Or can you just not tell which group belongs to that node from the diagram?
#animals
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