Does anyone know of a thorough taxomony chart for Chordata?
June 25, 2013 12:42 PM Subscribe
I work in an animal related field and sometimes people ask how closely related is x to y. Is there a thorough chart of Chordata (big category I know, but my focus is on aves and mammalia) I can study or reference? I am also personally interested.
The last time I took a biology class was high school, so I have no idea where to begin looking or even what terms are best to use to look.
The reason I want this chart is to identify how closely animals are related to each other (like being able to see when the last common ancestor of say, a sea otter and a harbor seal was). So, it is not important for this chart to be detailed on the vertical plane, in that I don't need to know who the first common ancestor of a human and a elephant was. Ideally this chart would have the species name and a picture of the extant animal at the top, then just latin names from there down until it hits the class level.
This chart is only for extant animals. Since according to Wikipedia half of the 75,000 extant species in Chordata "are bony fish of the class osteichthyes," fish of that class are not important to have on this chart. So, that narrows down this chart to 37,500 animals, and I doubt such a thing exists. However, is there a reasonably thorough version (say with, a few thousand species of birds and mammals particularly)?
I work in an animal related field and rarely people ask how closely related is x to y. In addition to being able to answer them correctly, I am also personally curious.
I would be willing to spend ~30 dollars for a poster or book on Amazon, and I have access to multiple library systems.
Thanks for any help!
The last time I took a biology class was high school, so I have no idea where to begin looking or even what terms are best to use to look.
The reason I want this chart is to identify how closely animals are related to each other (like being able to see when the last common ancestor of say, a sea otter and a harbor seal was). So, it is not important for this chart to be detailed on the vertical plane, in that I don't need to know who the first common ancestor of a human and a elephant was. Ideally this chart would have the species name and a picture of the extant animal at the top, then just latin names from there down until it hits the class level.
This chart is only for extant animals. Since according to Wikipedia half of the 75,000 extant species in Chordata "are bony fish of the class osteichthyes," fish of that class are not important to have on this chart. So, that narrows down this chart to 37,500 animals, and I doubt such a thing exists. However, is there a reasonably thorough version (say with, a few thousand species of birds and mammals particularly)?
I work in an animal related field and rarely people ask how closely related is x to y. In addition to being able to answer them correctly, I am also personally curious.
I would be willing to spend ~30 dollars for a poster or book on Amazon, and I have access to multiple library systems.
Thanks for any help!
Chordata is pretty big group. If you primarily care about birds and mammals, you'd probably be better off focusing on amniotes exclusively.
As an alternative, if you wanted to be cheeky you could use this molecular phylogeny of bony fishes.
If someone asks, for instance, how closely related sea otters and flying squirrels are, you could point to the "tetrapoda" branch of that chart and explain that they are both highly derived lobe-finned fish, closely related to lungfish and coelacanths, but you can't offer any more detail other than their last common ancestor with frogs was somewhere in the mid Carboniferous.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:38 PM on June 25, 2013
As an alternative, if you wanted to be cheeky you could use this molecular phylogeny of bony fishes.
If someone asks, for instance, how closely related sea otters and flying squirrels are, you could point to the "tetrapoda" branch of that chart and explain that they are both highly derived lobe-finned fish, closely related to lungfish and coelacanths, but you can't offer any more detail other than their last common ancestor with frogs was somewhere in the mid Carboniferous.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:38 PM on June 25, 2013
Building off of the previous answers, here is the Tree of Life Amniota page, giving you direct links to the two extant clades of reptiles (including the birds) and the clade of mammals and their extinct relatives. Zooming in further, here is clade Eutheria within the mammals, which is what you're looking for, and here is clade Neornithes within the reptiles, which will give you links to just the groups including the modern birds.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:31 PM on June 25, 2013
posted by hydropsyche at 5:31 PM on June 25, 2013
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Here's the Chordata root.
posted by bonehead at 1:08 PM on June 25, 2013 [1 favorite]