assessment and cladistic analysis of morphological, ultrastructural, and molecular data to uncover major early diverging lineages of green plants. Scotland et al. (2003 ? , p. 545) claim that morphological data are being superceded by molecular data because "much of the useful morphological diversity has already been scrutinized." This is clearly not the case for groups such as the green algae, for which new morphological data are still being obtained, albeit at a much slower rate than molecular data. Novel molecular lineages are prime targets for future ultrastructural studies, but molecular diversity is not always predictive of ultrastructural diversity (O'Kelly et al., 2004 ? ). If our goal is to circumscribe natural and recognizable groups, understand morphological evolution, and study adaptation, the collection of disembodied sequence data will be of little use without ultrastructural data. In the case of green algae, discovery and characterization of unsampled diversity could have an immense impact in recovering the green plant tree of life. Footnotes ? 1 The authors thank F. Zechman, M. Fawley, C. Lemieux, C. Delwiche, E. Harris, and R. Chapman for helpful advice and unpublished data. We are greatly appreciative of F. Trainor and two anonymous reviewers who provided extensive comments on the manuscript. Kyle Luckenbill did the line drawing artwork, and Stphane Marty prepared the color plate and cell images. The authors acknowledge support from National Aeronautics and Space Administration to LAL (EXB02 -- 0042 -- 0054) and the National Science Foundation to RMM (DEB 9978117). Chapman R. L. 1984