We present a novel distance-based algorithm for evolutionary tree reconstruction. Our algorithm reconstructs the topology of a tree with n leaves in O(n 2 ) time using O(n) working space. In the general Markov model of evolution, the algorithm recovers the topology successfully with (1−o(1)) probability from sequences with polynomial length in n. Moreover, for almost all trees, our algorithm achieves the same success probability on polylogarithmic sample sizes. The theoretical results are

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... ted by simulation experiments involving trees with 500, 1895, and 3135 leaves. The topologies of the trees are recovered with high success from 2000 bp DNA sequences.