XVI International Botanical Congess
Morphological similarities between Cycadales and Bennettitales have been dismissed as convergent in virtually all recent morphology-based phylogenetic analyses of seed plants. In all cases, Bennettitales have been grouped with angiosperms and Gnetales in the anthophytes. However, these analyses have, of necessity, been based on limited numbers of informative bennettitalean characters. And these analyses have included character coding based on restricted sampling of Cycadales. Phylogenetic analyses of matrices reflecting additional bennettitalean characters, careful analyses of these characters, and broader sampling of the Cycadales suggest that Bennettitales may in fact be more closely related to Cycadales than to the anthophytes (Bennettitales+Gnetales+angiosperms).