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Cited by 500

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Reconstructing ancestral character states: a critical reappraisal

Cunningham, Clifford W., Omland, Kevin E., Oakley, Todd H.·1998·Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Abstract

Using parsimony to reconstruct ancestral character states on a phylogenetic tree has become a popular method for testing ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. Despite its popularity, the assumptions and uncertainties of reconstructing the ancestral states of a single character have received less attention than the much less challenging endeavor of reconstructing phylogenetic trees from many characters. Recent research suggests that parsimony reconstructions are often sensitive to violations of the almost universal assumption of equal probabilities of gains and losses. In addition, maximum likelihood has been developed as an alternative to parsimony reconstruction, and has also revealed a surprising amount of uncertainty in ancestral reconstructions.

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Crossref · 10.1016/s0169-5347(98)01382-2

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Metadata

Authors
Cunningham, C. W., Omland, K. E., & Oakley, T. H.
Venue
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1998-09
Volume
13
Issue
9
Pages
361-366
ISSN
0169-5347 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1990157150
Cited by
500
References
5
FWCI
3.34
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Reconstructing ancestral character states: a critical reappraisal. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/s0169-5347(98)01382-2
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Cunningham, C. W., Omland, K. E., & Oakley, T. H. (1998). Reconstructing ancestral character states: a critical reappraisal. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0169-5347(98)01382-2

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.