collapsed; therefore majority rule trees are reported to visualize distinctiveness of groups of 
genera. Even with this probable source of drawbacks, it was worth to go ahead and point to some 
elements of interest from these strictly preliminary surveys realized. 
The cladogram obtained entering character data without any restriction, i.e. all character 
states unordered, is shown in figure 21. Figure 22 shows the majority rule consensus tree with 
restrictions imposed as commented in the charater state polarization section. This was a second 
run for the analysis of genera. A third run was effected including the hypothetical ancestor 
"Archaeodaphne" coding its characters 16 to 23 with 0 (introrse sporangia; see figure 20). Figure 
23 shows the corresponding majority rule consensus cladogram. Subdivision of the genus 
Cinnamomum into four groups representing the two sections recognized in the paleotropics, and 
the two morphological groups identified in the neotropics were coded for a fourth run of the 
q) analysis. The majority rule consensus tree for this evaluation is shown in figure 24. For the last 
two analyses characters were also coded with restrictions as explained above. 
It is important to stress that the way characters were defined and coded supplies some 
information regarding the evolutionary relationships among the genera in the Lauraceae. 
Nevertheless, placement of the different genera in the final outcome could be affected by two 
sources of ambiguity: lack of information for several characters in some genera, and 
interpretation of certain information regarding particular characters across the whole family. 
Discussion and conclusions. 
Discussion of results are basically referred to Rohwer's ideas on the subdivision of the 
family (Rohwer, 1993a). The first interesting issue is the separation at the bottom of the 
ll) 232 
