Caminalcules

Caminalcules are a fictive group of animal-like life forms, which were created as a tool for better understanding phylogenetics in real organisms.

[3] At a symposium dedicated to Camin, Dr. W. Wayne Moss said that "his collaborative studies on methods and principles of systematics at Kansas in the 1960s resulted in the appearance of that delightful taxon, the Caminalcules", and that "his thoughts helped to launch the infant field of phenetics and cladistics in North America".

According to Ulrich, the Didaktozoa are handier than the Caminalcules and were created in a way that more biologists would agree with, since phenomena such as homologous structures, apomorphy and organ reduction were taken into account in their creation.

[7] This was indeed the case; for example, Robert R. Sokal used the Caminalcules to investigate the ability of different numerical methods to estimate the true cladogram[3] as well as the consequences of introducing fossil species into a data set for cladistic and phenetic classifications.

[4] Whereas nowadays cladograms are usually created by applying algorithmic methods to gene sequences, Sokal numerically compared the morphological characteristics of organisms, rather than their genetic information.

[9] Caminalcules are commonly used in secondary school and undergraduate university curriculums as a tool for teaching principles of phylogeny and evolution.

[7][10] Students are typically asked to construct a phylogenetic tree based on the morphological characteristics of the Caminalcules and taking into account evolutionary principles.

Some examples are the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies,[12] the University of Miami,[13] Carleton College,[14] and the Turkana Basin Institute.