While only the latter study recovered monophyly of the Cypselomorphae (see below) within Metaves, the former was based on only a single locus and could not resolve their relationships according to standard criteria of statistical confidence.
The monophyly of Euphorbiaceae had long been held in doubt by some, but the first strong evidence of its polyphyly came in 1993 with the first maximum parsimony analysis of DNA sequences of the gene rbcL from a large number of seed plants.