This post was originally written for Talking Teaching, where it
has the title “what is the caminalcule lab supposed to teach?”
You can get some good ideas for posts from reading the search
terms that bring people to your site :-) I was first introduced
to the Caminalcules way back in the dim dark past when I was a
brand new undergraduate student. They were the basis of a lab
exercise on evolution & evolutionary relationships, & were
invented by the taxonomist Joseph Camin to aid learning about
taxonomy & classification. Here’s what they look like (these are
just the ‘living’ species): The idea was to sort them – both
‘living’ and ‘fossil’ species – into groups on the basis of
various similarities, & then to work out a possible family tree
(a phylogeny) that reflected their possible evolutionary
history. Camin used made-up ‘animals’ rather than actual
organisms because he wanted to avoid students’ preconceptions
about relationships affecting the development of their
phylogenetic trees. I must have found this r