It is important to note that due to horizontal gene transfer, the early days of life, and still bacteria to this day due to bacterial conjugation, are actually a graph and not a tree, see also: Figure "Graph of life".
Definitely have a look at: coral of life representations.
TODO vs Phylogenetic tree? www.visiblebody.com/blog/phylogenetic-trees-cladograms-and-how-to-read-them:
Cladograms and phylogenetic trees are functionally very similar, but they show different things. Cladograms do not indicate time or the amount of difference between groups, whereas phylogenetic trees often indicate time spans between branching points.
Coral of life by János Podani (2019)
Source. Fantastic work!!! Some cool things we can easily see:Mostly data driven.
Basically the same as clade.
All non-clade groups are evil. All non-clade terms must be forgotten. Some notable ones:
When a characteristic is basal, it basically means the opposite of it being polyphyletic.
E.g. monotremes laying eggs did not evolve separately after function loss, it comes directly from reptiles.
Kind of the opposite of a basal group.
Basically mean that parallel evolution happened. Some cool ones:
- homeothermy: mammals and birds
- animal flight: bats, birds and insects
- multicellularity: evolved a bunch of times
The cool thing about parallel evolution is that it shows how complex phenotype can evolve from very different initial genetic conditions, highlighting the great power of evolution.
We list some cool ones at: polyphyly.
