The study presents nine species from the family Amanitaceae collected during field work in Western Ghats forests of Karnataka State, which six (Amanita ballerina, A. franzii, griseofusca, lignitincta, Saproamanita manicata, and S. praeclara) are newly recorded India. Descriptions, illustrations, molecular phylogenetics all species, brief discussions on distinguishing characters, ecology, & ...

We review recent advances in our understanding of placental evolution with particular focus on the interhaemal barrier. It seems likely that the non-invasive, epitheliochorial placentation of living eutherians is a derived state. However, there is disagreement on whether the last common ancestor of eutherian mammals had an endotheliochorial placenta or a haemochorial one. Research has been stim...

Molecular phylogenetics studies the hierarchical evolutionary relationships among organisms by means of molecular data. These relationships are typically described through a weighted tree, called phylogeny, whose leaves represent the observed organisms, internal vertices represent the intermediate ancestors, and the edges represent evolutionary relationships between pairs of organisms. Molecula...

Phylogenetics is the study of the origin, development, and death of a taxon. It is a useful tool, for example, in the conservation of species. This chapter is an introduction to phylogenetics from the perspective of plant molecular biologists, using a case study on Saururaceae. Based on analysis using integrated data from DNA sequences and morphology, we also draw a surprising conclusion that S...

Phylogenetic trees reconstructed from molecular sequences are often considered more reliable than those reconstructed from morphological characters, in part because convergent evolution, which confounds phylogenetic reconstruction, is believed to be rarer for molecular sequences than for morphologies. However, neither the validity of this belief nor its underlying cause is known. Here comparing...

Introns are now commonly used in molecular phylogenetics in an attempt to recover gene trees that are concordant with species trees, but there are a range of genomic, logistical and analytical considerations that are infrequently discussed in empirical studies that utilize intron data. This review outlines expedient approaches for locus selection, overcoming paralogy problems, recombination det...

We report a molecular phylogeny for a nonavian dinosaur, extending our knowledge of trait evolution within nonavian dinosaurs into the macromolecular level of biological organization. Fragments of collagen alpha1(I) and alpha2(I) proteins extracted from fossil bones of Tyrannosaurus rex and Mammut americanum (mastodon) were analyzed with a variety of phylogenetic methods. Despite missing sequen...