monophyletic

[mon-oh-fahy-let-ik]

adjective

1. Biology.,  consisting of organisms descended from a single taxon.

monophyletic

/ ˌmɒnəʊfaɪˈlɛtɪk /

adjective

1. relating to or characterized by descent from a single ancestral group of animals or plants

2. (of animals or plants) of or belonging to a single stock

monophyletic

1. Relating to a taxonomic group that contains all the descendants of a single common ancestor. All clades, such as birds and placental mammals, are monophyletic.

2. Compare paraphyletic polyphyletic

Other Word Forms

• monophyletism noun
• monophylety noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of monophyletic¹

First recorded in 1870–75; mono- + phyletic

Example Sentences

They form a "monophyletic group," or a collection of animals with a common evolutionary ancestor that is believed to not be widely shared by other groups.

From Salon

Gene trees were rooted based on genes from A. trichopoda if these formed a monophyletic group in the tree; otherwise, mid-point rooting was applied.

From Nature

Nodes with support values below 0.95 were collapsed into polytomies and the maximally inclusive subtree was selected where all taxa were represented by no more than one sequence or, in cases where more than one sequence was present for any taxon, all sequences from that taxon formed a monophyletic clade or were part of the same polytomy.

From Nature

The last column provides the references2, 45, 47, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 used to establish that each taxon is monophyletic on the Hawaiian archipelago and arrived before Oahu had emerged.

From Nature

But the fact that all placoderms had bony claspers could be taken as evidence that they were a unified, monophyletic group, and this would contradict the cranial evidence that puts placoderms near the top of the jawed-vertebrate evolutionary tree.

From Nature