Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong: Scientists say convergent evolution is much more common than previously thought

According to new research by scientists at the University of Bath's Milner Centre for Evolution, determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing the different parts of the body is not a good idea. According to the study, we need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to their appearance.

Biologists have been trying to reconstruct the "family trees" of animals since Darwin and his peers in the 19th century.

With the development of rapid genetic sequencing techniques, biologists are now able to piece together evolutionary relationships for species very quickly and cheaply, often proving that organisms we once thought were closely related actually belong in completely different branches of the tree.

Scientists at Bath compared evolutionary trees based on their structure with those based on their data, and mapped them according to their location.

The animals that were grouped together by trees lived more closely together than the animals that were grouped by trees.

Matthew Wills is the Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at the University of Bath.

For over a hundred years, we've been classifying organisms according to how they look and are put together.

If you build an evolutionary tree of animals based on their genetics, it will fit better with their geographical distribution.

The biogeography of things is an important source of evolutionary evidence.

"For example, tiny elephant shrews, aardvarks, elephants, golden moles and swimming manatees have all come from the same big branch of mammal evolution, despite the fact that they look completely different from one another."

The group is called Afrotheria because it all comes from the African continent.

According to the study, convergent evolution is more common than biologists had thought.

Many famous examples of convergent evolution include flight in birds, bats and insects, or complex camera eyes in squid and humans.

We can see that convergent evolution happens all the time, even though we thought things were related.

People who impersonate celebrities aren't usually related to them, and people within a family don't always look the same.

It shows that evolution can come up with a solution to a problem in a different branch of the evolutionary tree.

convergent evolution has fooled us for over 100 years.

The idea that biogeography can reflect evolutionary history was a large part of what spurred Darwin to develop his theory of evolution through natural selection.

It's exciting that we find strong statistical proof of trees that fit better across the tree of life, not just in groups like Afrotheria.

It's a widespread pattern and shows how pervasive convergent evolution has been when it comes to misleading us.

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