Emoji Phylogeny

2025-07-03

[Last updated July 2025. Incorporates Unicode 16.0]

All life on Earth derives from common ancestry. We are all related, part of a single phenomenon called Life.

The evidence for common descent is abundant in our morphology and our biochemistry, in organisms still living and the remains of those long dead. There is much we are still learning, but with what we know, we’ve been able to reconstruct much of our shared evolutionary history.

We can describe this history, or phylogeny, using cladistics. A clade is a group containing a species and all of its descendants. For example, all birds share a common ancestor and therefore form a clade (called Aves). This clade emerged within and therefore belongs to the dinosaur clade (Dinosauria), which in turn emerged within a clade shared by crocodilians, turtles, lizards, and snakes (Sauropsida/Reptilia). These relationships can be illustrated in a phylogenetic tree, or cladogram.

I wanted a pocket reference for the tree of life, a simplified phylogeny that illustrated major milestones in evolution and relationships between recognizable organisms. And I realized, we already have a handy visual lexicon that includes many species of particular importance to human culture: emoji!

I therefore researched and assembled a phylogenetic tree of every emoji that represents a living organism. This, to the best of our current scientific knowledge (with reasonable consensus), is how the organisms represented in the Unicode emoji character set are related to one another.

A few notes: The images above use the Apple emoji designs. Some emoji, despite depicting living organisms, are too generic to include (e.g. 🌳 deciduous tree, 🌼 blossom, 🐦 bird, 🐛 bug, 🦠 microbe). Others (notably 🥬 leafy greens and 🫜 root vegetable) are worth including, but can represent organisms in different clades, and therefore appear multiple times. A handful of significant organisms are represented either in a processed (🍞 ☕️ 🫖 🚬 🍫) or symbolic (🧽 ⭐️) form. If a clade has no emoji to represent it, it’s ignored.

And to show my work and provide a more detailed reference, here is the same phylogeny as above presented as a collapsible tree in HTML/CSS. Clades are given names, with [brackets] standing in for those without official designations and arrows (▸) indicating an elision from a broader clade to a more specific clade of interest. Click on a clade name to expand and collapse it, or use the “Show All” option at the top. There’s also the option to highlight all the clades to which humans belong with a 👤.