Adding time to the tree https://evolution.berkeley.

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EVOLUTION 101 en Español print Patterns

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Patterns Adding time to the tree
The family tree
If you wanted to squeeze the 3.8 billion years of the history of life on Earth into a single
Understanding
minute, you would have to wait about 50 seconds for multicellular life to evolve,
phylogenies
another four seconds for vertebrates to invade the land, and another four seconds for
Trees, not ladders flowers to evolve — and only in the last 0.002 seconds would "modern" humans arise.
Building the tree
Biologists often represent time on phylogenies by drawing the branch lengths in
Homologies and proportion to the amount of time that has passed since that lineage arose. If the tree of
analogies life were drawn in this way, it would have a very long trunk indeed before it reached the
Using the tree for first plant and animal branches.
classification
The following phylogeny represents vertebrate evolution — just a small clade on the
Adding time to tree of life. The lengths of the branches have been adjusted to show when lineages split
the tree and went extinct.

How we know
what happened
when

Important events
in the history of
life

Mechanisms

Microevolution

Speciation

Macroevolution

The big issues

Download this graphic from the Image library.

Using the tree for How we know what

classification happened when

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