5 Ground truthing the Land Plant phylogeny Phylogenies are fundamentally just hypotheses For example no one was present during

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5 Ground truthing the Land Plant phylogeny Phylogenies are fundamentally just hypotheses For example no one was present during the hundreds of millions of years over which land plant evolution took place No one watched it happen and documented the branching pattern of their evolutionary history The Land Plant phylogeny that we use in this class is a conjecture based on cladistic analysis and other phylogeny reconstruction techniques It is definitely a conjecture that makes sense but did plants really evolve in the exact order that the phylogeny depicts How can we ever know for sure Is there any independent way to assess it Using first appearance data can help evaluate a phylogenetic hypothesis The term first appearance means the age of the oldest known fossil in a given group The branching sequence on a phylogeny proceeds through time from the bottom upward Theoretically then organisms on branches lower on the tree should have appeared first in time and should have an older fossil record compared to organisms to belong to branches higher on the tree

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