Choices A, B, D, and E are all incorrect. According to the cladogram, the organism which gave rise to an embryo is the ancestor of all plants. Therefore, the organism that developed from an embryo appeared before mosses, ferns, cone-bearing plants, and flowering plants.

C. an organism that developed from an embryo

According to the cladogram, the sequence in which the traits are arranged from the most recently evolved to the most ancient would look like this: flowers, seeds, vascular tissues, and embryo. In this case, flowers evolved more recently from an organism that developed from seeds. Therefore, the correct answer is A.

A. Flowers evolved more recently than seeds and vascular tissues.

According to the cladogram, flowers and cone-bearing plants have branched off from a common ancestor, which developed from seeds. Therefore, cone-bearing plants and flowers are closely related since they share a recent ancestor.

E. Cone-bearing plants are most closely related to flowering plants because they share the most recent common ancestor.

Unlike the traditional Linnaean classification system that focuses on the physical traits of species, the modern taxonomy focuses on the evolutionary connection between species to classify them into clades. A clade is a term that is defined as the group of species that evolved from a single common ancestor and all of its descendants. A clade is usually illustrated in a cladogram, which is a drawing that shows all the evolutionary relationships among species. It also shows how evolutionary lineages split from common ancestors.

A. Clades show evolutionary relationships.

Since DNA can be inherited from the parent into its offspring, it can be used as an evidence to point out the evolutionary relationships between organisms. This is the reason why scientists study the DNA sequences and compare the genetic information between the red pandas, giant pandas, bears, and raccoons. If the DNA of the giant pandas share more similarity with bears than with the raccoons, this means that the giant pandas and the bears had recently shared a common ancestor; hence, they are more closely related.

A. Organisms with the most shared derived genetic characters are considered the most closely related.