Can someone please give me some tips or help me build a cladogram from the following table of information? The outgroup is Lancelets and the first derived character is vertebrae, followed by Lampreys and jaws I believe. It’s not until after jaws I have trouble figuring out where to link up the organisms and traits. I’m assuming you cannot repeat or remove traits. When I look online the simpler examples do not help me much for this branching issue. I hope that made sense. It’s probably simpler then I think but I’m having a mental block with it. Any help would be great, thanks
26.3k 8 8 gold badges 53 53 silver badges 95 95 bronze badges asked Mar 21, 2018 at 17:33 21 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges$\begingroup$ Hi and welcome to this site. There are dozens of "How to draw a cladogram" instructions on the internet. Could be please edit your question and add, how you would follow those instructions with your example, and at what step exactly you are struggling? This community expects you to show you own efforts, otherwise your question might be closed as homework(like) question. $\endgroup$
Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 19:56$\begingroup$ I have looked online at written explanations and videos. I get the concept but for some reason I can only get so far with it until it just doesn’t make sense where to place the organisms in relation to the derived and shared characteristics. Most online examples seem to be a bit simpler with less variables. $\endgroup$
Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 20:29$\begingroup$ @Maria When the data size increases, one usually uses a computer program to build the tree, because it gets impossible to manually explore all the tree topologies and see which one is most parsimonious. $\endgroup$
