Data from: The root of flowering plants and total evidence

Evolutionary trees which show Amborella as sister to all other angiosperms have been commonly reported in molecular systematic investigations, but typically only when alignment positions with high levels of character state variation are included in data matrices (Zanis et al., 2002; Stefanović et al., 2004; Leebens-Mack et al., 2005; Jansen et al., 2007, Moore et al., 2010, Soltis et al., 2011, Drew et al. 2014). A close phylogenetic relationship between Amborella and aquatic herbs is also a relationship that has been repeatedly recovered by researchers, in this case typically when sites showing less character state variation are analysed (Barkman et al., 2000; Soltis et al., 2000; Zanis et al., 2002; Chang et al., 2005; Leebens-Mack et al., 2005; Qiu et al., 2005, 2006, 2010; Bausher et al., 2006; Jansen et al., 2006; Mardanov et al., 2008; Moore et al., 2007; Wu et al., 2007; Graham and Iles, 2009; Finet et al., 2010; Goremykin et al., 2010, 2013; Jiao et al., 2011, Wodniok et al., 2011; Laurin-Lemay et al., 2012; Xi et al. 2014). Goremykin et al. 2013 raised concerns that the commonly reported Amborella most basal placement is the result of a phylogenetic artefact due to systematic error and a poor fit between time reversible substitution models and sequence data. Goremykin et al (2013) showed that with chloroplast sequences this poor fit was mainly due to sequence positions in multiple sequence alignments that exhibit high levels of character state variation among angiosperms and gymnosperms.