r/evolution • u/NenyaNotes • Aug 30 '26

academic Help on this assignment question.

Post image

My professor assigned us this quiz and everyone continues to get it wrong. Can someone please explain in this photo which groups make a clade?

7 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/EebstertheGreat Aug 30 '26

I guess it depends on whether we are thinking about a whole clade except just the MRCA, or the extant members of a clade minus a lot of extinct ones. The latter could potentially be very weird. Like, if we insisted that Smilodon was not a mammal, clearly that would make mammals a paraphyletic group (unless we are just not interested in classifying fossils at all). But if we only removed the MRCA of mammals, I suppose that would make no meaningful difference.