Before the general acceptance of cladistics in paleontology, evolutionary trees were often drawn as the emerging of one group from another. The transitional forms were placed at the borders of these. With the establishment of cladistic methods, relationships are now strictly expressed in so-called cladograms, illustrating the branching of the evolutionary lineages.
The different so-called ‘natural’ or ‘monophyletic‘ groups form nested units that do not overlap. Within cladistics there is thus no longer a transition between established groups, but a differentiation that occurs within groups, represented as a branching in the cladogram.
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