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This poster is a wonderful reference material on the evolution of flowering plants. In it, you can see the major groups, and the plant families that fall within each of them.

If you’ve never read a cladogram before- which is the diagram made up of brackets- the horizontal axis is time and reads left to right. The further left you go, the further back in time you go. Every time a horizontal line splits into another nested bracket, there is divergence. The point of divergence is the common ancestor to everything after it.

The image above is a rough example of how cladograms work. Here, the present is at the top of the image, and the past at the bottom. This image clearly shows common ancestry, and the shared traits that defines everything beyond it. In this example, the lizard is more closely related to the chimpanzee than the lamprey; and, it can be said that the bear and chimpanzee diverged from their common mammalian ancestor at the same time.

Keep these cladogram basics in mind as you pore through the intense angiosperm poster!