Closest Kin

The science behind the game

In Closest Kin the answers aren’t written by hand. The game works them out from a tree of relationships built on published studies.

Close relatives share a recent ancestor

Two animals are closer relatives when their last common ancestor lived more recently. Here is one of the rounds of the game.

Archosaursabout 246 million years agoSauropsidsabout 280 million years ago
  1. Nile crocodile
  2. Chicken
  3. Green iguana
The Nile crocodile and the chicken belong to the same branch, Archosaurs: they share a more recent common ancestor than the one that links them to the green iguana. That ancestor is reconstructed by comparing its descendants: its fossil is not known. The split dates back to about 246 million years ago. To find a common ancestor of all three you have to go back to Sauropsids, about 280 million years ago.

Why looks deceive

Distant animals can look alike because they live in the same way. Scientists call it convergence: the same solution appearing more than once, on different branches.

Where relationships and ages come from

The tree of the game has 150 species and 136 groups. Every branch and every age comes from studies published in scientific journals, 159 in all.

Ages are estimates. They say how long ago a common ancestor lived, and they can change when new studies come out.

After every round, “Sources” shows the works the explanation is based on.

Each reference was checked one by one on Crossref, the international registry of scientific publications.

Found a mistake?

Science corrects itself, and so does the game. After every explanation you can report a problem, or you can write to us from the support page.

Bibliography

The 159 works the game is built on, in alphabetical order.

Show all the sources
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