Below you will find cladograms I have created to display the phylogeny of animals I've spotted on different trips.
Some interesting things I learned in the process of creating these:
- Sea urchins are more closely related to humans than they are to molluscs.
- Humans are more closely related to squirrels than we are to bears.
- Whales and dolphins are more closely related to muskoxen than they are to seals.
I used Wikipedia's clade template, whereby cladograms are rendered in HTML using nested tables, as a starting point. I was also inspired by "phylogeny of all the plants i can remember eating" at ribo.zone. Digging into this great piece of work aided me in bypassing the Wikipedia template and figuring out how to build cladograms directly in HTML. If you want to build your own cladograms, please see my short cladogram guide for assistance with the code.
- Santa Cruz Island, California, and Alaska (Aug/Sept 2024)
- Exmouth and Ningaloo Reef, WA (May 2026)