Figure 3

Evogram of the transition of tetrapods from water to land in the Devonian, by Brian Swartz. The quotation at upper left is from the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People (Davis et al. 1989). An evogram provides a variety of information, including a phylogeny based on numerous characters, pictures and reconstructions of actual living and fossil specimens, and illustrations of homological transitions of features such as limb bones and digit numbers. Note that the ‘fish-amphibian’ transition is given in quotation marks: true fishes (rayfins like the trout) did not evolve into amphibians (frogs and salamanders and their relatives). Rather, this evogram depicts the evolution of the first tetrapods from basal sarcopterygians in the Devonian.