Interrelationships among the Gross Morphological Features of Angiosperm Leaves

Abstract

Using a collection of 120 modern shade leaves, the interrelationships among 21 primary leaf characters, used to classify fossil angiosperm leaves were examined. Each character was qualitative and measured some aspect of external leaf morphology. The standardized data were analyzed by 2 methods. First, a phenogram was constructed from a similarity matrix of distances using the UPGMA clustering algorithm. An ordination diagram was drawn using the coordinates of the characters in a 3-dimensional space obtained by principal components analysis. Both methods indicated that the characters were statistically interrelated.