Question

A scientist has discovered a new organism and wishes to classify it based on morphology and genetics. While he is waiting on the genomic data, he analyzes the morphological data. The new organism has homologous structures to birds and analogous structures to bats. However, he observes one trait that is shared with bats but not birds. What should he do?

Answer 1

Answer:

This species is phylogenetically related to birds (since it shares homology to birds) and is not evolutionary related to bats

Explanation:

The presence morphological analogies to bats but not present in birds are the product of an evolutionary process, these structures are defined as evolutionary novelties

Answer 2

Answer:

tentatively group it with birds and speculate that the trait shared only with bats is a derived rather than an ancestral trait with bats.

Explanation:

The scientist after his observation should tentatively classify this organism with birds and the the second end of calculating the other morphological traits which makes it possess the likely bat traits to be ancestral.

According to scientists, most widely used modern systematic practice

depends upon the assumption that a change from character in one species

to character occurs once and once only in the evolutionary process and that this process is irreversible so that it never returns.

In this scheme, there are no independently derived parallel evolutionary changes,

nor convergences from a variety of states to a single one. Therefore, when two organisms share a

character state different from other species, it is because they are more closely related to each other through a recent common ancestor than they are to other species.

Also using the parsimony principle, a scheme of common ancestry for all the species is derived that uses all the characters that have been observed.