What might the tree look like? Again he drew a sketch, and, to his surprise, the editors of Science printed it. He called this one “a reticulated tree.” It was a tangle of rising and crossing and diverging and converging limbs. It had its antecedent (as Doolittle acknowledged) in a somewhat similar figure offered by Martin in his “Mosaic” paper. Martin’s tree resembled a sea fan, one of those delicate structures built by a colony of coral-like animals on the ocean floor. Its long limbs and branches rose wavily, diverging from a simple base.
