Some extended plant phylogenies
Tag Archives: phylogeny
New Phylogenetic Trees!
Here are my extended trees with brand new creatures! I’ve done a view artworks myself referencing some of these newer creatures, but it took me until now to tie them all together. Mostly I took the existing tree, but started new lineages beginning where the other trees ended, effectively creating 12 generations instead of 6 in those lines. The red circle denotes a separate lineage from that point in another offshoot, which you can see in the second image there.
Orchids, Bees, and Bee-Vision!
While at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens here in Richmond, I’ve been evolving some Orchids. You can see me going through part of the process in that video there, but here’s the phylogenetic tree of the flowers as well. At the 2nd generation the bees are introduced, along with ‘bee vision’ which is a red filter in our case. Bee’s actually see far more colors than people can (especially the ultraviolet) so they would probably see things that looked more blue or purple, but the red filters worked well in our case. If you look up ‘what bee’s see’ or ultraviolet photos of flowers, you can see a more realistic depiction of what a bee would see when they look at a plant. This should also give you an idea
For us, the colors blue as well as darker colors in general stand out a lot more than something like red, which would appear invisible. The flowers also began to look more like bees, as is the case of the actual bee orchid, a flower which has evolved to look so much like bees that actual bees try to mate with it and get stuck with pollen instead.
I’ve included a ‘bee vision’ version of the tree as well, to give you an idea of how the flowers looked through the hand lenses. You can see how the very first generation before the bee’s are introduced to the game have almost invisible flowers.
Happy Darwin Day!
It’s Darwin Day everybody! A day to celebrate science and evolution (and Charles Darwin’s birthday!), Darwin Day is a fairly recent phenomenon, but hopefully it’ll grow in time!
To celebrate, I’ve finished a version of my Evolution! animation, with drawings and sound effects from the Science Museum of Virginia! They, like all the groups, have their own specialized ending, this time ending with the Rainforest. The animation will be playing today in the rotunda of the Science Museum, but you can watch it here, too. Enjoy!
Evolution! At the Science Museum of Virginia
I ran through my evolution project at the Science Museum of Virginia today and plan on doing a custom version of my existing animation for them (hopefully finished by Darwin Day, Feb 12th).
In the meantime, here are some sound effects I recorded from them!
Biomorphs
http://physics.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/
In reference to the “biomorphs” from Richard Dawkins “The Blind Watchmaker,” I found a site that allows you to evolve the weirdly shapes critters on your own! This more or less mirrors exactly how I get my drawings, so start mashing some squares and see what you can come up with! (at first the biomorphs will be very small, so just keep clicking until you start to see something you like and then go for it.)
Scientific American Returns
Well, it looks like Dr.Carin Bondar over at Scientific American wrote up another little piece about my latest evolution animation! You can check it out here.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/11/19/the-master-of-evolution-animation-returns/
Evolution! with kids from VCU’s Lobs and Lessons
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my original plan for my evolution animation was to have 5 of them, one for each group of people did the experiment with. As you can see in my tree of life image, each group I did the evolution game with stems from my starting salamander creature, and follows the exact same series of events until the last part, where they each deviate. The group in the animation everyone knows ends with the ‘ice age’ but there’s also the deep sea, the sky, the mountains and the underground. I intended to re-animate each group, swapping out the creatures as I went, and then make a different end-cap to finish off each custom animation.
I never actually finished any of these alternate animations… until now that is! This animation is from one of the groups from Lobs and Lessons, a program at VCU’s Mary and Frances Youth Center. You can see more about them here http://www.vcuyouthcenter.org/
With these drawings the group went through the same experience as everyone else, only instead of an “Ice Age” like the first animation, these creatures were driven “Underground.” Because of this they have their own special ending sequence! Enjoy!
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Chain of Evolution
Along with my plant evolutions I did 4 more creature evolutions that carried on where the last groups left off a year ago. So where their 6th generation ended in a large group, I selected a single creature from that bunch and started with that with the new group. These were the creatures I used in my original animation, which I extended again with a brand new group, beginning again with the walrus like creature. In any case, I decided I would make some images of the isolated evolutionary chains that begat each new blossoming of life.
