Animal Family Trees
Every animal alive today has a family tree that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Follow any two animals' lines back far enough and they meet at an ancestor they share. Find out why a whale's closest living cousin is a hippo, why an elephant is family to a manatee, and how scientists work out what animals they have never seen looked like. Play Ancestor Merge to rewind the tree yourself.
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Did You Know?
A hippo is more closely related to a whale than it is to a pig or a horse.
Dogs didn't come from today's wolves. Dogs and today's wolves both come from an older wolf that has died out.
The first legs had six to eight toes, not five.
In family-tree terms, a frog is a branch of the bony fishes. So are you.
Penguins and ostriches both lost the ability to fly, separately. Their shared ancestor could fly.