The Tree of Life

 For the class of August 26 we were asked to do a phylogenetic tree, such as if we were trying to teach high school students about the difference between paraphyletic and monophyletic. I had an entire video I came up with, but unfortunately this blog does not like large amounts of data, so instead I just made a chart and took a picture after hours of frustration: 

So this is a phylogenetic chart, beginning with Hyracotherium, the distant ancestor of horses. In my scenario they live on a massive island. Half of the island develops a volcano, which leads to all hyracotherium on that side of the island dying except the ones that develop scales. In the meantime,the hyracotherium on the non volcanic side proceed as in our world and become horses. A strange new predator arrives on the island. As a result, some of the scaled hyracotherium develop horns, as do some of the horses. This aids them in self defense, so in areas where these predators are numerous only the horned creatures survive. I named the horned horses unicorns, and the horned, scaled hyracotherium kirin. Then the entire island suffers from massive earthquakes and mini-volcanic eruptions. THis make the region more mountainous. Over time, some of the creatures on the island develop wings, but the predator dies out. So now you have pegasi and unicorns who have descended from the horses. On the other side of the island you have Kyrin and Wyverns who have descended from the scaled hyracotherium. Pegasi and Unicorns in this case would be monophyletic. since both are descended from horses. The Kyrin and Unicorn however have more in common than the other creatures, Kyrin basically looking like unicorns with scales. They are not as closely related however, and so would be paraphyletic to each other.