what is meant by conservative characters in class

The concept of conservatism is basic tomuch of taxonomy. A conservative charac-ter is usually defined as one that haschanged more slowly than a non-conserva-tive one during phylogeny. The reliabilityof a character for placing organisms prop-erly in evolutionary schemes is also in-cluded in conservatism. It is argued quitevalidly that a character which changesslowly is the best kind of character for dis-cerning the evolutionary relationships oforganisms. This is true in practice becauseof the very incompleteness of the historicalrecord of phylogeny. When not all theforms of a line are known, there will begaps in the record of rapidly-changing char-acters. But slowly-changing ones may stillhave a fairly complete series represented,even if only a few forms are known. Thepatterns of evolutionary relationship areeasier to trace in characters that evolveslowly.