Page "Cladistics" Paragraph 4

The term clade was introduced in 1958 by Julian Huxley after having been coined by Lucien Cuénot in 1940, cladistic by Cain and Harrison in 1960, and cladist ( for an adherent of Hennig's school ) by Mayr in 1965.

Hennig referred to his own approach as phylogenetic systematics.

From the time of his original formulation until the end of the 1980s cladistics remained a minority approach to both phylogenetics and taxonomy.

However, in the 1990s it rapidly became the dominant set of methods of phylogenetics in evolutionary biology, because computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics.

At about the same time the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques allowed the application of cladistic methods to biochemical and molecular genetic traits of organisms as well as to anatomical ones, vastly expanding the amount of data available for phylogenetics.