If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the relationships between different organisms (tree of life) were first established in the 19th century and were done so by looking at similarities in form and function and is the basis for scientific names. Since the development of genetic analysis, has there been an effort to go back and confirm that these educated guesses were correct? If so, were there any huge surprises? Like learning that animals that were thought to be closely related based on how they look are actually much more distant
In: Biology
Simply, yes. Researchers have programs to analyze the genetic codes of every documented species and confirm how similar the DNA of 2 related species are. They then trace back their evolutionary history based on DNA sequences (pieces of genetic code) that are gained/lost from one species to another.
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