Cladophorales are an
order
Order, ORDER or Orders may refer to:
* A socio-political or established or existing order, e.g. World order, Ancien Regime, Pax Britannica
* Categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated, and understood
...
of
green algae
The green algae (: green alga) are a group of chlorophyll-containing autotrophic eukaryotes consisting of the phylum Prasinodermophyta and its unnamed sister group that contains the Chlorophyta and Charophyta/ Streptophyta. The land plants ...
, in the class
Ulvophyceae
The Ulvophyceae or ulvophytes are a class of green algae, distinguished mainly on the basis of Ultrastructure, ultrastructural morphology, Biological life cycle, life cycle and molecular phylogenetics, molecular phylogenetic data. The sea lettu ...
.
The earliest known representative is ''Proterocladus antiquus'' from the
Mesoproterozoic
The Mesoproterozoic Era is a geologic era that occurred from . The Mesoproterozoic was the first era of Earth's history for which a fairly definitive geological record survives. Continents existed during the preceding era (the Paleoproterozoic ...
-
Neoproterozoic
The Neoproterozoic Era is the last of the three geologic eras of the Proterozoic geologic eon, eon, spanning from 1 billion to 538.8 million years ago, and is the last era of the Precambrian "supereon". It is preceded by the Mesoproterozoic era an ...
boundary in North China.
The order Cladophorales consists of filamentous macroalgae attached to a surface. The filaments are uniseriate (one cell thick) with multinucleate cells, and are unbranched or profusely branched. In some taxa, the filaments are modified into giant single cells, three-dimensional networks of branches, or pseudoparenchymatic clusters.
[
Currently, Cladophorales has an expanded ]circumscription
Circumscription may refer to:
* Circumscribed circle
* Circumscription (logic)
*Circumscription (taxonomy)
* Circumscription theory, a theory about the origins of the political state in the history of human evolution proposed by the American anthr ...
that includes Siphonocladales. Classification has been difficult, because the simple morphology has led to convergent evolution
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last comm ...
. The current hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships are shown below:[
]
References
Chlorophyta orders
Taxa named by Ernst Haeckel
{{Ulvophyceae-stub