Ancestral State Reconstruction
Ancestral state reconstruction (ASR) is a phylogenetic method that infers the character states (trait values or evolutionary features) of extinct ancestors by analyzing patterns of variation in extant (living) species. Developed by Wayne Maddison and colleagues in the 1990s, ASR uses the phylogenetic tree and observed trait variation in living species to estimate what ancestors possessed, enabling researchers to trace the evolutionary history of morphological, behavioral, ecological, and genomic traits.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Maddison, W. P. (1991). Squared-change parsimony reconstructions of ancestral states for continuous-valued characters on a phylogenetic tree. Systematic Zoology, 40(3), 308–314. · DOI 10.2307/2992324
- Schluter, D., Price, T., Mooers, A. O., & Ludwig, D. (1995). Likelihood of ancestor states in adaptive radiation. Evolution, 51(6), 1699–1711. · URL
- Pagel, M. (1999). Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution. Nature, 401(6756), 877–884. · DOI 10.1038/44766
Curated claims
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Related methods
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