Phylogenies provide evolutionary biologists with a framework to test evolutionary hypotheses.
However, it is well known through simulation studies that phylogenies based on molecular sequence data are susceptible to erroneous hypotheses of relationships and that taxon sampling has a major influence in accurately assessing relationships. 300 taxonomic sets were constructed by randomly selecting one taxon from each of the 40 clades. The resulting topologies were collected and compared to each other by both the tree comparison method of symmetric distance and consensus methods. The expectation that each taxonomic set should result in identical topologies was not met. These results strongly support the need for increased taxon sampling in molecular phylogenies.