A proof of the rooted tree alternative conjecture

Bonato and Tardif [A. Bonato, C. Tardif, Mutually embeddable graphs and the tree alternative conjecture, J. Combinatorial Theory, Series B 96 (2006), 874-880] conjectured that the number of isomorphism classes of trees mutually embeddable with a given tree T is either 1 or infinite. We prove the analogue of their conjecture for rooted trees. We also make some progress towards the original conjecture for locally finite trees and state some new conjectures. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.