I don’t think I was ever taught about clades and I am confused by them. Are they there to challenge the hierarchy of Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, etc. etc. or are they something else? Have they replaced any of those D.,K.,P., C., O., F., G., S.? Should I italicize clades?
Please help. Thanks!
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A clade is any group containing all the descendants of a particular ancestral creature.
For example, at some far distant point there was a species of small furry creatures that was the ancestor to all mammals, but not the ancestor to anything else. This makes mammals a clade, as it is the group containing all of that species’s descendents.
Clades come in all sizes, for example primates are all the descendants of a common ancestor, so that is another smaller clade that exists within the clade of mammals.
However, there are animal-groups that we commonly think about aren’t clades. There was never a creature that was ancestor to all fish and only the ancestor to fish. If you go back to the creature that was common ancestor to sharks and salmon, it turns out to also be the ancestor to a lot of non-fish creatures (for example, us). So fish aren’t a clade.
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