Casual Use
"Form taxon" can more casually be used to describe a wastebasket taxon: either a taxon that is not a natural (monophyletic) group but united by shared plesiomorphies, or a presumably artificial group of organisms whose true relationships are not known, being obscured by ecomorphological similarity. Well-known form taxa of this kind include "ducks", "fish", "reptiles" and "worms".
Read more about this topic: Form Classification
Famous quotes containing the word casual:
“O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)