page_title: Basal (phylogenetics)
section_title: Flowering plants
hierarchical_section_title: Basal (phylogenetics) / Examples / Flowering plants
caption_attribution_description: English: Amborella trichopoda, track to Plateau de Dogny, New Caledonia
context_page_description: In phylogenetics, basal is the direction of the base of a rooted phylogenetic tree or cladogram. The term may be more strictly applied only to nodes adjacent to the root, or more loosely applied to nodes regarded as being close to the root. Each node in the tree corresponds to a clade; i.e., clade C may be described as basal within a larger clade D if its root is directly linked to the root of D. The terms deep-branching or early-branching are similar in meaning.
  While there must always be two or more equally basal clades sprouting from the root of every cladogram, those clades may differ widely in taxonomic rank, species diversity, or both. If C is a basal clade within D that has the lowest rank of all basal clades within D, C may be described as the basal taxon of that rank within D. The concept of a 'key innovation' implies some degree of correlation between evolutionary innovation and diversification. However, such a correlation does not make a given case predicable, so ancestral characters should not be imputed to the members of a less species-rich basal clade without additional evidence.
context_section_description: The flowering plant family Amborellaceae, restricted to New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific, is a basal clade of extant angiosperms, consisting of the most basal species, genus, family and order within the group (out of a total of about 250,000 angiosperm species). The traits of Amborella trichopoda are regarded as providing significant insight into the evolution of flowering plants; for example, it has "the most primitive wood (consisting only of tracheids), of any living angiosperm" as well as "simple, separate flower parts of indefinite numbers, and unsealed carpels". However, those traits are a mix of archaic and apomorphic (derived) features that have only been sorted out via comparison with other angiosperms and their positions within the phylogenetic tree (the fossil record could potentially also be helpful in this respect, but is absent in this case). The cladogram below is based on Ramírez-Barahona et al. (2020), with species counts taken from the source indicated.
caption: Amborella trichopoda, the most basal extant angiosperm
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