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The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, conceptual model, and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). [1]
The idea of a tree of life arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being).Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371 –c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants. [7]
All animals on Earth share a common ancestor.Trace back the history of any creature from humans to slugs, and you’ll eventually be able to follow all of the branches on the animal tree of life ...
An olive tree in Ano Vouves, Crete, claiming such longevity, has been confirmed based on tree-ring analysis. [65] [66] Stara Maslina (Old Olive Tree) near Stari Bar in Montenegro, is estimated to be over 2,200 years old. [67] Tāne Mahuta, a kauri tree (Agathis australis) in New Zealand, is believed to be between 1,250 and 2,500 years old. It ...
The term phylum was coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel from the Greek phylon (φῦλον, "race, stock"), related to phyle (φυλή, "tribe, clan"). [4] [5] Haeckel noted that species constantly evolved into new species that seemed to retain few consistent features among themselves and therefore few features that distinguished them as a group ("a self-contained unity"): "perhaps such a real and ...
Tree-kangaroos are marsupials of the genus Dendrolagus, adapted for arboreal locomotion. They inhabit the tropical rainforests of New Guinea and far northeastern Queensland, Australia along with some of the islands in the region. All tree-kangaroos are considered threatened due to hunting and habitat destruction. They are the only true arboreal ...
Sloths are a Neotropical group of xenarthran mammals constituting the suborder Folivora, including the extant arboreal tree sloths and extinct terrestrial ground sloths. Noted for their slowness of movement, tree sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down in the trees of the tropical rainforests of South America and Central America.