Fig. 2.

Molecular phylogeny of deuterostome taxa within the metazoan tree. Echinoderms are shown in orange, hemichordates in magenta, cephalochordates in yellow, urochordates in green, and vertebrates in blue. The maximum-likelihood tree was obtained with a supermatrix of 506,428 amino acid residues gathered from 1564 orthologous genes in 56 species (65.1% occupancy), using a Γ + LG model partitioned for each gene. Plain circles at nodes denote maximum bootstrap support. This tree clearly indicates that Deuterostomia comprises two discrete groups, Ambulacraria and Chordata (from [35])