Exam 4: Taxonomy and Phylogeny of Animals

Systematists often use a principle called ________________ to resolve conflicts among taxonomic characters.

Character states that are found in a study group but are absent from an outgroup are defined as ancestral characters.

Character similarity that results from common ancestry is called _______________.

The major criteria used for recognizing taxa in the evolutionary taxonomy are common descent and amount of adaptive evolutionary change.

Which of the following best describes the phylogenetic position of the single-celled eukaryotic organisms?

Evolutionary taxonomy places Hominidae as a family separate from Pongidae because

"A single lineage of ancestor-descendant populations which maintains its identity from other such lineages and which has its own evolutionary tendencies and historical fate" describes the _______________.

To a cladist,the statement that molluscs evolved from roundworms implies:

The statement that amphibians evolved from fishes is inconsistent with cladistic taxonomy.

Which of the following terms is not relevant to cladistic systematics?

Unlike ancestral character states,variant forms of characters that arose later within the group are named ____________ character states.

Which of the following concepts of species is most compatible with the goals of cladistic systematics?

A clade defines a unit of evolutionary common descent that includes the most recent common ancestor of the group and all of that ancestor's descendents.

A derived character shared by members of a clade is formally called a __________________.

According to the binomial system of nomenclature,the Aedes in Aedes vextans refers to the

Comparative biochemical data are sometimes useful for estimating the ages of different lineages on a phylogenetic tree.

Which of the following distinguishes a phylogenetic tree from a cladogram?

Two different taxa are termed sister groups if they share common ancestry with each other more recently than either one does with any other organisms.

The statement "mammals evolved from reptiles" implies _______________ groupings in our current state of taxonomy.

The family-level classification of anthropoid primates violates the principles of cladistic taxonomy because