• Emergence of numerical/phenetic phylogeny in the 1960s–70s, replacing dependence on character-state matrices with distance-based, quantitative similarity measures to infer relationships among taxa [12], [2], [1].

• Molecular and biochemical data become primary evidence for phylogeny: immunological distances, enzyme isozymes, protein variation, and early ribosomal RNA comparisons expand systematics beyond morphology [9], [18], [10], [13].

• Plant phylogeny/classification is advanced through morphology, anatomy, and explicit reconstructions, with foundational angiosperm syntheses and composition evidence shaping taxonomic paradigms [5], [7], [15], [3], [8].

• Methodological foundations and critiques influence inference: discussions of parallel/monophyly, guiding principles, and fallacies condition how phylogenies are inferred and defended [20], [16], [6].