Diagram: phylogenetic tree — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

ggplot2 example: phylogenetic tree — Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: Sibley & Ahlquist 1990, via ape (Paradis & Schliep 2019) (GPL)

chart

phylogenetic tree

Tree showing the kinship relationships between taxa.

arbre phylogénétique

aussi : phylogénie

Arbre figurant les relations de parenté entre taxons.

La longueur des branches ne code une quantité que si la figure le dit.

Classification

chart
networks and trees › binary trees
the name evokes: nature

Channels

position on common scale; main: distance from the root
length; main: branch length (evolutionary distance)
color hue; secondary: clade

Attestation

French term: French Wikipedia ↗

Scientific literature

Wikidata

Seminal references

first known use (1837) Darwin (1837). Notebook B: Transmutation of species; Andrews 2017
diffusion (1859) Darwin (1859). On the Origin of Species; Wikipedia in English
diffusion (1866) Haeckel (1866). Generelle Morphologie der Organismen; Andrews 2017

R packages

R ggtree::ggtree(); GitHub 935 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (4 860 citations) Bioconductor.

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(ape)
library(ggtree)

data(bird.orders)
## The root splits the tree in two: ratites and fowl, then all other orders.
fowl <- c("Struthioniformes", "Tinamiformes", "Craciformes", "Galliformes", "Anseriformes")
tree <- groupOTU(bird.orders, list(fowl = fowl))

p <- ggtree(tree, aes(colour = group), linewidth = 0.4) +
  geom_tiplab(size = 2.3, offset = 0.3, family = "Quicksand") +
  annotate("text", x = 1, y = 0, label = "Ratites and fowl", colour = "#9b2367",
           hjust = 0, size = 3) +
  annotate("text", x = 1, y = 24, label = "The other 18 orders", colour = "#2e7891",
           hjust = 0, size = 3) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = c(`0` = "#2e7891", fowl = "#9b2367")) +
  scale_x_continuous(expand = expansion(mult = c(0.02, 0.32))) +
  labs(title = "The root splits five bird orders from eighteen",
       subtitle = "Orders of birds, branch lengths from how much their DNA differs",
       caption = "Data: Sibley & Ahlquist 1990, via the ape R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
  theme(legend.position = "none", axis.text = element_blank(), axis.title = element_blank(),
        axis.line = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank())

Sources (9)

18 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 1 book

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/phylogenetic-tree.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. phylogenetic tree. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/phylogenetic-tree.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-phylogenetic-tree,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {phylogenetic tree},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/phylogenetic-tree.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-02. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.