A supertree method for rooted trees

The amalgamation of leaf-labelled (phylogenetic) trees on overlapping leaf sets into one (super)tree is a central problem in several areas of classifi cation, particularly evolutionary biology. In this paper, we describe a new technique for amalgamating rooted phylogenetic trees. This appears to be t he first such method to provably exhibit particular desirable properties wh ich we list and establish. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserv ed.