🌳 Reading Cladograms

What you’ll learn

1. Family Trees of LifeDefine a cladogram and explain that each branching point is a shared ancestor.A cladogram is a branching diagram that shows how living things are related by the traits they share. It is read from the bottom up, and every branching point stands for a shared ancestor. Animals on nearby branches are close relatives; those far apart are distant cousins.
2. Shared TraitsExplain how shared traits group animals and match traits to the groups that have them.Cladograms are built from traits. Some traits, like a backbone, are shared by huge groups; others, like feathers, belong to small groups. The more traits two animals share, the more closely related they are, which is why a cat and a human are close cousins but a shark is a distant one.
3. Reading the BranchesDefine a clade and order traits from the widest group to the narrowest.A clade is a whole branch of the tree — an ancestor and all its descendants. Traits stack up the tree from those shared by the most animals to those shared by the fewest. Reading cladograms this way lets scientists show that birds are part of the dinosaur clade.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Natural History Museum
• American Museum of Natural History
• Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
• Britannica

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

Related Science courses