the main branches — from comb jellies to chordates · who is actually related to whom
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
A box is a clade: a group with all its descendants. Deeper shared box, closer kin. Arthropod share after Zhang, Zootaxa 3703 (2013).
Bilaterian animals split early into two halves according to what the embryo’s first opening becomes: in protostomes it becomes the mouth, in deuterostomes the anus. A sea urchin and you share one box; a crab, a snail and an earthworm share the one next door.
A second surprise hides in there: a roundworm shares its box with an insect, not with an earthworm. "Worms" is as invented a group as "invertebrates" — to assemble the latter you would have to remove a single branch from inside the chordates and stitch together everything that was left.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 6 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
from the Challenger Deep to the summit of Everest · one scale, nothing compressed
from the first synapsid to us · 320 million years on one axis
when each group appeared · five hundred million years on one axis
fifteen formulas · every letter explained beneath it