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.

900 Years of Tree Diagrams, the Most Important Data Viz Tool in History. Trees are a data viz tool that has outlived empires and endured huge upheavals in the arts and sciences.

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.