Process / pipelinePhylogenetic reconstruction
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.
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Sources
- 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: 10.2307/2992330 ↗
- Schluter, D., Price, T., Mooers, A. O., & Ludwig, D. (1995). Likelihood of ancestor states in adaptive radiation. Evolution, 51(6), 1699–1711. DOI: 10.2307/2410806 ↗
- Pagel, M. (1999). Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution. Nature, 401(6756), 877–884. DOI: 10.1038/44766 ↗