{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,11,2]],"date-time":"2026-11-02T23:14:58Z","timestamp":1793661298262,"version":"4.5.1"},"reference-count":55,"publisher":"Oxford University Press (OUP)","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,8]],"date-time":"2026-05-08T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1778198400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/pages\/standard-publication-reuse-rights"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,17]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title>\n                  <jats:p>Forty years of phylogenetic analysis have failed to resolve the relationships among the major groups of seed plants. From the fossil record, it is clear that more seed plant groups have gone extinct than are extant, though some direct ancestors of today\u2019s clades could have survived. Here, we reanalyze morphological matrices relevant to seed plants, applying two underutilized visualization tools: Networks for displaying incompatible phylogenetic signal and Romerograms (spindle diagrams) for depicting alternative relationships, suspected budding speciation, and surviving ancestors. Surviving ancestors give rise to hard polytomies, and networks may help pinpoint them as suggested by experiments in which we added simulated ancestors to our matrix. Romerograms\u2014whose reproducible construction we illustrate\u2014offer a heuristic means of representing phylogenetic hypotheses, and we argue that the field\u2019s near-exclusive focus on identifying sister groups and representing them in cladograms may have driven phylogenetics into an impasse. Identifying true evolutionary polytomies warrants further methodological research, but broadening the repertoire of data visualization approaches may help overcome the field\u2019s entrenched bias toward strictly dichotomous trees.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1093\/evolut\/qpag087","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,8]],"date-time":"2026-05-08T11:48:59Z","timestamp":1778240939000},"page":"1613-1619","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Surviving ancestors, hard polytomies, and seed plant evolution"],"prefix":"10.1093","volume":"80","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3704-0703","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Susanne S","family":"Renner","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Biology, Washington University in Saint Louis , Saint Louis, \u00a0","place":["United States"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Guido W","family":"Grimm","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Independent researcher , Orl\u00e9ans ,","place":["France"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dmitry D","family":"Sokoloff","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University , Tel Aviv ,","place":["Israel"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"2026081706064036100_bib1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"63","DOI":"10.2307\/2412223","article-title":"Monophyly and associated terms","volume":"20","author":"Ashlock","year":"1971","journal-title":"Systematic Zoology"},{"key":"2026081706064036100_bib2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"22","DOI":"10.1093\/jxb\/erz411","article-title":"Hunting the Snark: The flawed search for mythical Jurassic 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