Ancestral state reconstruction involves estimating the unknown trait values of hypothetical ancestral species at internal nodes of a phylogenetic tree. In this review, I’ll illustrate the theory and practice of ancestral state reconstruction for both discrete and continuously-valued phenotypic traits, highlight several use cases via a set of empirical examples, and discuss the statistical properties of ancestral state estimation as well as its limitations.
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Liam J. Revell (2024) studied this question.
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