Biggest thing of note: when making a phylogeny for only one characteristic, that's kinda easy, it usually follows a time line type thing.
If only it were that easy.
In lab we ran into issues with the character state that we used (sagittal crest) as we ended up with a straight line. Once we went home to study group we came out with all kinds of possibilities on the white board when taking into account many different character states at once. We broke up into teams, made our own phylogenies, and then had to defend them to each other. Not such an easy task after all.
There's the how to.
You can see how we ended up with a time based line... not so insightful.
I feel like here we may have been caught up too much in the formalities of genus names and gave less consideration to actual characters, save for trying to stick Australopithecus sediba in there with some sort of logical place to go.
This one was backed up with many more morphological characteristics, and as a result ended up much more bush-like with many dead ends instead of a couple.
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