Fig. 3. Phylogenetic relationships of Tuatara populations in relation to Lady Alice Island molecules (M1 and M2).
Analysis of 12 mt-protein-coding genes from published data9,10 not including ND5 in relation to both M1 and M2 sequences from LAI reported here. Bootstraps are depicted above with decay indices below. The tree has a length of 1302 steps from analysis of 9522 aligned sites of which 170 are parsimony informative; the entire tree collapses in 26 steps, hence the decay index below branches. Using LAI M2 as a root, it is implicated it is placed between northern and southern populations forming two groups separating in the Cook Strait. These northern and southern groups have only 1.0% sequence divergence between them, while sequence divergence to LAI M2 is 11.1%. The upper left corner shows relative branch lengths with the LAI M2 sample considerably different in nucleotide changes. Phylogram depiction of the shortest tree illustrates branch length DNA changes along the shortest path.