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.

In biology, phylogenetics () is the study of evolutionary relation among groups of organisms ( e. g. species, populations ), which is discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices.

Trees are useful in fields of biology such as bioinformatics, systematics and comparative phylogenetics.

Alternatively, for viral phylogenetics and ancient DNA studies, two areas of evolutionary biology where it is possible to sample sequences over an evolutionary timescale, the dates of the samples themselves can be used to calibrate the molecular clock.

* molecular ecology-a field of evolutionary biology concerned with applying molecular population genetics, molecular phylogenetics, and genomics to traditional ecological questions.

In recent decades, however, advances in molecular biology and computational technologies have opened new possibilities for studying the diversity and history of life through the use of cladistics and computational phylogenetics.

* In biology: phylogenetics

Subfields include monographic and revisionary studies, cytotaxonomy, molecular systematics, phylogenetics, plant anatomy and comparative aspmorphology, ecology, plant geography, and reproductive biology.

Molecular ecology is a field of evolutionary biology that is concerned with applying molecular population genetics, molecular phylogenetics, and more recently genomics to traditional ecological questions ( e. g., species diagnosis, conservation and assessment of biodiversity, species-area relationships, and many questions in behavioral ecology ).

Ameghino was a leading pioneer in the development of phylogenetics and of the paleontological approach of evolutionary biology.

* Systematics, cladistics, phylogenetics, phylogeography, biogeography and taxonomy classify and group species via common descent and regional associations.

However, although the phylogenetics of this group has become much more understood in recent years, there remains some dispute over which taxon level is most appropriate.

Recent analyses using cladistics and molecular phylogenetics recognise Dendrobranchiata as the sister group to all other Decapoda, collectively called Pleocyemata.

Molecular phylogenetics reveals that they form a polyphyletic group and could see a split into several new phyla.

This makes standard cladistic analyses unsuited to resolve the phylogeny of that particular group of ferns, and even very sophisticated computational phylogenetics methods yield little information.

* Derived, in phylogenetics, a trait present in an organism, but absent in the last common ancestor of its group

In cladistics or phylogenetics, an outgroup is a ( monophyletic ) group of organisms that serves as a reference group for determination of the evolutionary relationship among three or more monophyletic groups of organisms.

In phylogenetics, the crown group of a collection of species consists of the living representatives of the collection together with their ancestors back to their last common ancestor as well as all of that ancestor's descendants.

The relationships of this close-knit group are therefore hard to resolve with standard methods of computational phylogenetics.

In 2004, Clarke became the first to define the hesperornithean group in terms of phylogenetics.

Modern phylogenetics has made Camptosaurus by definition part of the clade Ankylopollexia, of which group it would then be a basal member.

While scientists do not always agree on how to classify organisms, molecular phylogenetics, which uses DNA sequences as data, has driven many recent revisions along more efficient, evolutionary lines and is likely to continue to do so.

Because the fossil record of chordates is poor, only molecular phylogenetics offers a reasonable prospect of dating their emergence.

However, the use of molecular phylogenetics for dating evolutionary transitions is controversial.

# the science of phylogenetics and its methods ( phylogenetic analysis = cladistic analysis ), although sometimes the term is restricted to maximum parsimony ;

The science that tries to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and thus discover clades is called phylogenetics or cladistics, the latter term being derived from " clade " by Ernst Mayr ( 1965 ).

The continued study of these oldest fossils is paramount to calibrate complementary molecular phylogenetics models.

The final quarter of the 20th century saw the development of molecular phylogenetics, which investigates how closely organisms are related by measuring how similar the DNA is in their genomes.

Molecular phylogenetics has also been used to estimate the dates when species diverged, but there is controversy about the reliability of the molecular clock on which such estimates depend.

For example geochemical signatures from rocks may help to discover when life first arose on Earth, and analyses of carbon isotope ratios may help to identify climate changes and even to explain major transitions such as the Permian – Triassic extinction event .< ref name =" Twitchett "> A relatively recent discipline, molecular phylogenetics, often helps by using comparisons of different modern organisms ' DNA and RNA to re-construct evolutionary " family trees "; it has also been used to estimate the dates of important evolutionary developments, although this approach is controversial because of doubts about the reliability of the " molecular clock ".

Taxonomy, the classification, identification, and naming of organisms, is usually richly informed by phylogenetics, but remains methodologically and logically distinct.

Although phylogenetics itself is fundamental to modern-day systematics, its use for the description of new taxa, and placement within a classification scheme, is unrequired.

As a result, phylogenetics tends to have a direct impact on taxonomic classifications, even though it is not a part of taxonomy.

This is an example of molecular phylogenetics.

However, there is potential for confusion with the mathematical meaning of ' support ', and this terminology is not widely used outside Edwards ' main applied field of phylogenetics.

") Molecular phylogenetics have clarified the relatedness of some associated genera, and at least nine genera that were previously included in Cornaceae have been eliminated from the order Cornales entirely, but the circumscription of Cornaceae is still unclear.

Molecular phylogenetics is the analysis of hereditary molecular differences, mainly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships.

Molecular phylogenetics is one aspect of molecular systematics, a broader term that also includes the use of molecular data in taxonomy and biogeography.

This is called molecular systematics or molecular phylogenetics.

However, systematics alone deals specifically with relationships through time, and can be synonymous with phylogenetics, broadly dealing with the inferred hierarchy of organisms.

Recently Bayesian inference has gained popularity amongst the phylogenetics community for these reasons ; a number of applications allow many demographic and evolutionary parameters to be estimated simultaneously.

Three genera, Uranomys, Lophuromys, and Acomys were once considered to be murines, but were found to be more closely related to gerbils through molecular phylogenetics.