Assignment No.

What is Cladistics?

Cladistics is a biological classification system that focuses on identifying common

ancestry of related groups. It tends to examine shared characters between organisms so as their
network of evolutionary relationships and provides a categorization based on these shared traits.
It can also be used to trace ancestry back to shared common ancestors and evolution of various
characteristics so as to predict properties of organisms.

What is a Cladogram?

A cladogram is a diagram depicting a hypothetical branching sequence of lineages

leading to the taxa under consideration whereas the points of branching within a cladogram are
called nodes while all taxa occur at the endpoints
Moreover. cladograms depend on two main scientific ideas, that is: time flows in one
direction only and life forms are closely related if they share new features. The first concept is
represented in cladograms by moving strictly from left to right (common ancestors must arise
prior to descendants.

Thus, common ancestors of related groups must arise prior to these descendants in time,
just as in genealogy parents arise before their children. Just as parents cannot inherit
characteristics from their children, an hypothesis of ancestry requires that the “ancestor”;
occurred earlier in time than its first “descendants.”

The second idea is that life forms are closely related if they share new features, feathers for
instance; that is, characteristics that first appeared in an ancestor common to them both.
Cladograms group life forms in terms of shared new characteristics that indicate commonality of
ancestry. All of the descendants to the right of a branch point share that new feature; none of the
creatures to the left does.