PZ's Tree of Life

Chuditch

Chuditch
Due to a combination of hype for the upcoming DLC and procrastination, I decided to spend tonight putting together an evolutionary tree of Planet Zoo's entire roster (as one does). The result is below:

Planet Zoo's Tree of Life

PZ%20Tree%20of%20Life%20-%20Final.png


Purple for invertebrates, blue for amphibians, green for (non-avian) reptiles, yellow for birds and red for mammals (varying from light to dark red between monotremes, marsupials and placentals)​

To make it a bit easier to understand, I've also broken the tree down into smaller categories:
Invertebrates
VqUVVt3.png


Blue for molluscs, red for myriapods, green for insects and purple for arachnids
Amphibians
vADos2g.png


Yellow for caudatans and green for frogs
Reptiles

PZ%20Tree%20of%20Reptiles%20-%20Final.png


Green for lizards, red for snakes, blue for turtles, purple for crocodilians, brown for palaeognath birds and yellow for neognath birds
Mammals

PZ%20Tree%20of%20Mammals%20-%20Final.png


Purple for monotremes, orange for marsupials, green for xenarthrans, grey for afrotheres, yellow for rodents, magenta for primates, blue for bats, brown for ungulates and red for ferans

NOTE: The timber wolf here is classed as Canis lupus occidentalis for simplicity's sake

God we need more birds.

Additionally, here is a tree of species from the base game for the sake of comparion:
LVBqkPB.png


Purple for invertebrates, blue for amphibians, green for (non-avian) reptiles, yellow for birds and red for mammals

Mostly just made this out of boredom, but I hope some of you find it interesting. Will likely update it with future additions.
 
Last edited:

biggest_dreamer

biggest_dreamer
I’ve read before that some subspecies of brown bear are more closely related to the polar bear than they are to each other which made no sense to me then and it still makes no sense to me now, but it’s fascinating. Any chance you could try and shed some light on that?

Regardless, this is awesome. I love charts and graphs, and I love phylogenetic trees.
 

FoxyDee

FoxyDee
Amazing, some of these always surprise me, for example how close hyena is to meerkat. How weirdly evolution works, some of the species that look completely different are more related than some of these that look similar.
 

jcp011c

jcp011c
That is an amazing graphic, and it highlights just how much Mammals outnumber every other class. There's no question in my mind that as a realistic zoo simulator, there should be more mammals than birds, fish, amphibians, insections, reptiles etc. There is more visual diversity among mammals, imo, than any other class, and they tend to be the bigger draws in most zoos.

But....I just feel like it shouldn't be this overbalanced. It's roughly 2/3rds of the animals in game, when I feel like it should be about half. That's 92 mammals in right now when to me it ought to be around 70. The fact that we have more felines, canines, primates (including lemurs) and antelopes alone than we do the total of birds just go to show how overshadowed birds are. I could say the same with fish, but the fact there isn't a single fish in the game leads to me think they may not have been in mind to put in the game at all (though of course, nothing is for certain and who knows what may come in the future).
 

Chuditch

Chuditch
biggest_dreamer said:
I’ve read before that some subspecies of brown bear are more closely related to the polar bear than they are to each other which made no sense to me then and it still makes no sense to me now, but it’s fascinating. Any chance you could try and shed some light on that?

Regardless, this is awesome. I love charts and graphs, and I love phylogenetic trees.
Click to expand...
Essentially, polar bears descend from a particular population of brown bears that became isolated by glaciation approximately 150,000 years ago and then specialised for hunting in a polar, semi-marine environment, hence why some brown bear subspecies are more closely related to polar bears than they are to other brown bears. Not only are they descended from brown bears, but they're still able to produce fertile offspring with them, so if we strictly followed the traditional biological species concept they'd still be considered the same species. However, modern taxonomy basically recognises that it's very difficult to properly define what a species is (there are at least 26 recognised species concepts now lol), and so most people agree that the polar bear is morphologically and ecologically distinct enough to still be considered a separate species. After all, each species has to descend from within another, the polar bear is just a particularly recent example.

In the case of this tree, the Himalayan brown bear is actually the most divergent of all brown bear subspecies, so the grizzly is inherently more closely related to the polar bear.

EDIT: Looking at it again, apparently more recent evidence suggests that polar bears do not actually descend from within brown bears, but that the two split off from one another significantly earlier and then continued to exchange genes through intermittent breeding (which is what confused earlier studies). So discard everything I said earlier lol, seems that's outdated now.
A comparison of the nuclear genome of polar bears with that of brown bears revealed a different pattern, the two forming genetically distinct clades that diverged approximately 603,000 years ago,[28] although the latest research is based on analysis of the complete genomes (rather than just the mitochondria or partial nuclear genomes) of polar and brown bears, and establishes the divergence of polar and brown bears at 400,000 years ago.[29]
Click to expand...
Polar bears can breed with brown bears to produce fertile grizzly–polar bear hybrids;[5][31] rather than indicating that they have only recently diverged, the new evidence suggests more frequent mating has continued over a longer period of time, and thus the two bears remain genetically similar.[30] However, because neither species can survive long in the other's ecological niche, and because they have different morphology, metabolism, social and feeding behaviours, and other phenotypic characteristics, the two bears are generally classified as separate species.[32]
Click to expand...
I'll update the tree to swap the bears around when I get a moment
 
Last edited:

Antimony96

Antimony96
The Formosan (subspecies of Asiatic) black bear is closer to the brown/polar bears than it is to the sun bear (which isn't even the genus Ursus)
 
Last edited:

Chuditch

Chuditch
Antimony96 said:
The Formosan (subspecies of Asiatic) black bear is closer to the brown/polar bears than it is to the sun bear (which isn't even the genus Ursus)
Click to expand...
This is actually another case of taxonomy being weird. Different bear species have shifted around the family tree a fair bit, but in recent studies the Asiatic black bear has been placed closer to the sun bear + sloth bear clade than to other Ursus bears. The best way to resolve this genus issue would be to move the sun and sloth bear into Ursus, which some taxonomic studies (like this one) have already done.

F3.large.jpg


EDIT: The relationship between brown bears and polar bears on the tree has now been updated. Also reshuffled musteloidea based on advice from a friend
EDIT 2: Also just noticed I called white-faced capuchins "white-capped capuchins", will fix next time I need to update the tree
 
Last edited:

Chuditch

Chuditch
The PZ Tree of Life has received its first update! In a period of only 2 months PZ has had a whopping 13 species added to its roster, by far the largest number of species added to the game in such a short period of time thus far. Let's hope it continues!

5UzSs95.png

In terms of taxonomic additions, while we did get more of the usual cats, dogs and ungulates, we also received some very important additions to several groups that have been either neglected or were entirely absent from PZ's roster. While another carnivoran, the striped hyena is the only the second member of Hyaenidae and the first one added since the base game. In a similar fashion, we finally got a second species added to Macropodidae - easily the most important family of marsupials in zoos - with our very first wallaby. The nine-banded armadillo is both the first armadillo and the second xenarthran added to the game, finally giving us another member of South America's old endemic placental group. Finally we received our third ratite and second member of Casuariiformes with the ever-popular Emu, which also adds a tiny contribution to the tragically small bird roster.

Easily the highlight of taxonomic representation however was the unexpected addition of not one but five species of butterfly, bringing the Lepidoptera from being completely absent from PZ's roster to arguably well-represented. Their addition has also doubled the number of insects in the game, which is good for a group that may make up 80%-90% of all animal species on our planet.

The trees in the original OP have been updated of course.
 
Last edited:

Chuditch

Chuditch
NZFanatic said:
I dispute this! Nowhere has Frontier ever said that. It's always been an assumption, but the fact is they made a conscious choice in keeping it as Canis lupus without further specification.
Click to expand...
It was a conscious choice on their part to keep it generic and I respect that, but I think assuming that Frontier's wolf is based on the northwestern wolf is pretty fair given the evidence - apart from the design and the fact it is included in the New World building set, it is even name-dropped in certain translations. In any case I had to pick a subspecies to decide where to place it in relation to the arctic wolf and dingo (a northwestern wolf would be closer to the arctic wolf, a Eurasian wolf would be closer to the dingo, an Indian wolf would split off before either etc), so C. l. occidentalis was the natural choice.
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
Chuditch said:
It was a conscious choice on their part to keep it generic and I respect that, but I think assuming that Frontier's wolf is based on the northwestern wolf is pretty fair given the evidence - apart from the design and the fact it is included in the New World building set, it is even name-dropped in certain translations. In any case I had to pick a subspecies to decide where to place it in relation to the arctic wolf and dingo (a northwestern wolf would be closer to the arctic wolf, a Eurasian wolf would be closer to the dingo, an Indian wolf would split off before either etc), so C. l. occidentalis was the natural choice.
Click to expand...
Whether they based it on an American wolf or not, the fact remains that at the end of the day they still decided to keep it unspecified, even going so far as to include nothern Eurasia within its range in the Zoopedia. Besides which, it's stylised enough that it is actually a pretty good approximation of what a North American and Eurasian wolf might look like mixed together.

I've always been an advocate of specifying it and I'll allow that it is closer to the Northwestern wolf in appearance (hence why I also advocate for a true Eurasian wolf to be added, either in DLC or as part of an update), but as it currently stands giving a specification goes against what Frontier decided for it, and is therefore inaccurate.
 

Chuditch

Chuditch
NZFanatic said:
I've always been an advocate of specifying it and I'll allow that it is closer to the Northwestern wolf in appearance (hence why I also advocate for a true Eurasian wolf to be added, either in DLC or as part of an update), but as it currently stands giving a specification goes against what Frontier decided for it, and is therefore inaccurate.
Click to expand...
How would you propose the wolf be tackled in the tree then?
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
Chuditch said:
How would you propose the wolf be tackled in the tree then?
Click to expand...
I don't think you have to change it - it's still your work, you can do whatever you like with it. I only commented because I don't like the notion that it's a 'general consensus' thing that the wolf is American (I doubt that was your intent, in any case). A lot of folks use it as a Eurasian wolf because it's listed as a European animal, and I wouldn't want any of those people to be dissuaded from doing so if they see people claiming "it's called C. lupus but it's actually not" when it actually is (Frontier screwed around with it, but it is what it is).

If it were me, though, I'd have a single branch for Canis lupus, a branch for the dingo coming off of that branch, and then a branch for the Arctic wolf at the same level as the dingo.
 

Chuditch

Chuditch
NZFanatic said:
A lot of folks use it as a Eurasian wolf because it's listed as a European animal, and I wouldn't want any of those people to be dissuaded from doing so if they see people claiming "it's called C. lupus but it's actually not" when it actually is (Frontier screwed around with it, but it is what it is).
Click to expand...
I agree this should be avoided until a better solution comes about (if ever), so I've removed the line about it being the subspecies the wolf is predominantly based on and instead said that it is classed as C. l. occidentalis for simplicity's sake.
 

Chuditch

Chuditch
biggest_dreamer said:
You've got the Old World Swallowtail listed twice in place of the other species which escapes me.
Click to expand...
Oops! Don't know how I made 3 different trees without noticing that. The one closest to the menelaus blue morpho is meant to be the European peacock, I'll fix it when I get a moment.

EDIT: It has been fixed
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom