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
There are multiple questions here, and the answer to all of them is “yes”. The way this is done is by sequencing genomes and comparing them. The more differences between them (particularly in highly conserved bits of DNA), the further back they diverged. It’s a tricky thing to do though as there are a lot of places for human and even machine error to come into play. It should be noted that “a species” is really a gene pool, not one genome, which means results can vary a lot depending on which members of the species you sample, since some members of a species are going to be more genetically similar to a given related species than other members.
I can’t think of any good examples of surprises, unfortunately, but I do know they exist from encountering them previously (and if I’d have known this question would be asked one day, I’d have bookmarked them). If I recall correctly. most of the ones I found were plants.
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