Angiosperm phylogeny

Angiosperm phylogeny is the evolutionary history and branching relationships of flowering plants, reconstructed from fossils, morphology, and molecular data.

Angiosperms: Angiosperms are flowering plants whose seeds develop enclosed within a carpel, usually becoming fruit. This is the plant lineage whose evolutionary relationships the phylogeny describes.
Angiosperm Phylogeny Group: The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group is an international collaboration that publishes consensus classifications of flowering plants. Its successive classifications translate phylogenetic evidence into a widely used taxonomic framework.
Early Cretaceous: The Early Cretaceous is the first epoch of the Cretaceous Period, spanning about 145 to 100 million years ago. The earliest widely accepted angiosperm fossils occur within this interval.
Mesangiospermae: Mesangiospermae is the large angiosperm clade comprising all living flowering plants except Amborella, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales. Its internal branching order contains some of the most consequential unresolved backbone relationships.
Monocots: Monocots are a major angiosperm clade whose embryos typically have one seed leaf. Their placement among early-diverging flowering-plant lineages helps frame the broad tree.
APG IV: APG IV is the 2016 Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification of flowering-plant orders and families. It shows how current evidence is organized into a practical higher-level classification.
Archaefructus: Archaefructus is an extinct genus of aquatic plants known from Early Cretaceous fossils in China. Its fossils provide a notable early glimpse of flowering-plant reproductive structures.
Austrobaileyales: Austrobaileyales is an early-diverging angiosperm order that includes star anise and Austrobaileya. Its exact relationships among the earliest living angiosperm lineages help determine the rootward tree.
Eudicots: Eudicots are a large angiosperm clade characterized ancestrally by pollen with three apertures or their derivatives. This major clade accounts for much of the branching diversity within the flowering-plant tree.
Chloroplast DNA: Chloroplast DNA is the genetic material in plant chloroplasts, often used to study evolutionary relationships. Many early molecular trees relied on chloroplast genes to compare distant angiosperm lineages.

Linked from 11 pages