All life on earth evolved from a single
universal ancestor, represented here as the base of a tree. This animation
shows how different living things developed and diverged from this original
organism. The three major divisions of life on earth consist of the Bacteria,
the Archaea, eukaryotes, which together can be systematically organized into
a structure known as an evolutionary tree. Yellow dashed lines indicate
points at which members of certain Bacterial species evolved into the
mitochondria and chloroplasts of eukaryotic cells. Bacteria are represented
here as the blue branch on the tree, eukaryotes are shown in brown, and
Archaea in purple. Stemming from the eukaryotes are the plants, shown in
green, the fungi, shown in beige, the animals, in red, and the protists, represented by the remainder of the brown
eukaryotic branch. This variation among different organisms arises due to the
mutations in DNA which causes the genetic blueprint of living things to
become gradually altered. Over time, these changes result in the appearance
of a wide array of of distinct organisms.
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