02 August 2010

Phun Phylogenies

Pete Buchholz recently started compiling a phylogeny of edible plants, based on the APG III system. I ran it through Names on Nodes and produced a diagram:


A Phylogeny of Edible Plants


(Unfortunately, this version strips out the clade labels—I'll try and rectify that at some point.)


When I saw this, I though, what a fantastic way to learn plant phylogeny! It's something I don't know much about (apart from basics, like the differerence between gymnosperms and angiosperms), and so I found it fascinating to see the ways the foods I eat are related to each other.


It's such a good idea, I couldn't resist doing another version for edible animals and fungi:




And this reminded me of another project I'd been meaning to start for a while, so I finally took a stab at it. A phylogeny of cartoon animals!




(That's right, there's a stuffed tiger clade.)

10 comments:

  1. Nifty trees. I made a version of the edible plant phylogeny a while back too (though less detailed). You should show the crazy hybridization within citrus since your cartoon animal tree shows the program's capable of it.

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  2. I believe Pete is working on it :)

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  3. Heh, I notice there's a food item called "long pig" in the second tree...

    Über-nerdy nitpick question on the cartoon animal phylogeny: Why do you have Woody Woodpecker and Woodstock as sister taxa? If it's the Peanuts character that we're talking about, then I'm pretty sure that it's supposed to be a passerine of some kind rather than a woodpecker. (This is the first official appearance of Woodstock, but there had been occasional appearances of other, more clearly sparrow/finch-like small birds in Peanuts before that.)

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  4. In the second biology course taken at my school (basic overview of evolution and a survey of biodiversity), the professor had us make a phylogeny of all the Coke products. Pretty fun (albeit nonsensical).

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  5. @Dartian, yes, I think that was a mistake. Somehow as a kid I got the idea he was a woodpecker. I always thought it was odd, since there are no yellow woodpeckers. I'll reclassify him into the passerines.

    (And yes, I feel I have to include anything where there is a special name for the meat, as opposed to the animal.)

    Phylogeny of Coke products? How would you even determine polarity? (Or was it unrooted?)

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  6. Usually Sprite or some other non-Coke Coke product is used as an outgroup with classic Coca-Cola used as the common ancestor. From there traits like caffienation, loss of sugar, zero-cal, cherry, vanilla are assumed to "evolve." Like I said, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense - it's just a way to get freshmen thinking about evolutionary trees, parsimony, ancestral vs derived traits, etc.

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  7. Hi Mike, just noticed this absolutely funny cartoon tree via the Smithsonian blog. Hey but where's Garfield??? Did I miss it somewhere? And on a "technicality" - should Teddy Bear be a node, branch or ludospecies name ?!

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  8. Cool, didn't know they had linked to it!

    Garfield -- that's a big omission.

    What's a ludospecies? I can't find that term.

    "Teddy bears" would probably be a subclade of Ursus arctos (much like polar bears).

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  9. Just kidding, Mike. I intended "ludo-species" to be a general referral to all the playful cartoon names there, as is ichnospecies for all the traits. "Ludo-" as explained in _Ludodactylus sibbiki_.

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  10. Ah, "game species". Hmm, what about "graphospecies" or "iconospecies"?

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