Don't be fooled: Flowers mislead traditional taxonomy

For hundreds of years, plant taxonomists have worked to understand how species are related. Until relatively recently, their only reliable source of information about these relationships was the plants' morphology--traits that could be observed, measured, counted, categorized, and described visually. And paramount among these morphological traits were aspects of flower shape and arrangement. However researchers have now found that floral morphologies may be less reliable than other traits in determining the relationships of papilionoid species and genera.

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