Adapted from a web based activity huts and Elolts. Please do not visit the website. [}o the activity on your own. The earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and within a half billion years the first life originated. Everything alive today is descended from those rst simple life forms. In the tree of life, some groups of living things branched out along different paths long ago and now have little in common. while others have branched only recently and are still very similar. In other word s, some living things are close relatives. while others are distant cousins or near total strangers. It isn'talways easy to see that family history because we can only look at species that are alive today [the living buds at the tips of the branches} while the rest of the tree is hidden in the past. Sometimes a fossil of an extinct species provides a clue. but fossils are rare and finding them requires hard work and a lot of luck'. The science of Taxonomy uses the similarities and differences between organisms as clues to try to gure out the puzzle of relationships. 1when we classify organisms, we can use a lot of different traits. For example, we could use whether the females produce milk, whether they have feather and what color they are. We use different classification schemes depending on what the goal is. We could classify everything based on whether it's edible. Cows, button mushrooms and corn would be in one group. WthE pufferfish, death cap mushrooms and foxglove would be in the don't eat it group. If you have a child with allergies. you may classify your world this way. No peanut products in the house! Often we classify based on how similar species are based on how closely related species are. This is kind of like a giant family tree. In this rst activity, you are going to make a family tree of small steel stuff that is in a drawer. You are going to make a tree that divides groups by asking one yes or no question and then another