So, you can read a tree diagram like a picture story of evolutionary history. The trunk of the tree is the ancestral line, made up of generation after generation of the same type of organisms.

a collection of tree-based diagrams of science and human knowledge, published in 1296. The work is thought to have influenced thinkers like Francis Bacon and Renes Descartes. Lima argues that ...

Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring.