monophyletic
Adjective
Meaning
Of or pertaining to a single family or stock, or to development from a single common parent form; -- opposed to polyphyletic; as, monophyletic origin.
Source: Webster's dictionarySynonyms
Related terms
Examples
A family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family.
Cavalier-Smith does not accept the requirement for taxa to be monophyletic ("holophyletic" in his terminology) to be valid.
By the early 21st century, vertebrate paleontologists were beginning to adopt phylogenetic taxonomy, in which all groups are defined in such a way as to be monophyletic ; that is, groups include all descendants of a particular ancestor.
For example, of the 36 genera in the subfamily Cactoideae sampled in the research, 22 (61%) were found not monophyletic.
Are crocodiles really monophyletic?
A study in 2008, using a larger set of genes, concluded that the lophophorates were closer to the Lophotrochozoa than to deuterostomes, but also that the lophophorates were not monophyletic.