Tortoise Trees

Now we'll use the information from the chart to determine how closely related the different species are. Scientists use complicated statistical analyses to build trees that show the evolutionary relationships among species. We are going to do a streamlined version of what scientists do, but follow the same basic principle: the smaller the difference between two data sets, the closer related the species are.

We are going to do this step by step. First, start putting these species into groupings based on the genetic data you collected.