Abstract— In this paper, we study the use of cooperation as a technique for designing faster algorithms for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Our focus is on the use of cooperation to reconstruct trees based on maximum parsimony. Our baseline algorithm is Rec-I-DCM3, the best-performing MP algorithm known-to-date. Our results demonstrate that cooperation does improve the performance of the baseline algorithm by at least an order of magnitude in terms of running time. The use of cooperation also achieved new results in terms of the best-known scores, which the non-cooperative algorithm was unable to find.