Geological and climatological processes that have impacted the biota of the Northern Hemisphere during the Tertiary are expected to yield little resolution when area cladograms are compared without taking the timing of diversification into account. In an attempt to establish a set of appropriate phylogenetic comparisons, we distinguished between a Pacific track involving (minimally) China, Japa...

The phylogeny of Cercis (Fabaceae) was estimated with DNA sequences of the nuclear ribosomal ITS region and the 39 end of the chloroplast gene ndhF. The combined analysis recovers three trees in which a well supported clade of North American and western Eurasian species is nested within a paraphyletic group of Chinese species. In the single most unambiguously resolved topology from these trees,...