Pitfalls of the long branch
Frederick B. Essig (noreply@blogger.com)
In both cases, these lineages branched off very early, over 100 million years ago, but have left no fossils, and have no close living relatives. The Amborella branch is the earliest surviving lineage of angiosperms in general, while the Acorus branch is the earliest surviving lineage of monocots. Expressed in a different way, Amborella is the sister group to all other angiosperms, and Acorus is the sister group to all other monocots.
At the level of phylogenetic analysis, such long branches...