Boston’s college mascots, placed into a Tree of Life by Jenny B. '25

Have you ever wondered how different college mascots are evolutionarily related to each other? Of course not. If you said yes, then you’re lying. I’m the only person ever who’s asked this question, and I’m pretty sure that I can claim the title of being the founder of mascot phylogenetics. Put that down on my Wikipedia page if I ever become famous.⁠01 jk please don't

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The initial idea

I got the inspiration for this from one of my favorite YouTubers and writers Jon Bois, where he ranked every NCAA FBS college football mascot by their weight.

At first, I was just going to copy Jon’s idea and make something similar with Boston-area college mascots. I was going to make a weight chart at first, and then I changed my mind to a height chart.

imagine something like this, but with college mascots (image credit: Fred Wierum)

As it turns out, relying on measurements was going to be finicky when I only have Google to get my source material from. Different mascots were going to have varying levels of accuracy based on the data available about their physical measurements.

I decided a phylogenetic tree was going to be a better approach, given these limitations.

phylogenetic tree – A diagram that shows the evolutionary relationships between different species. These are based on our current understanding and knowledge of biodiversity, so these trees are essentially just hypotheses and not hard facts.

(1/2)

(2/2)

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Khan Academy has a good explanation about them.

Getting the mascots

After I found a list of nearby colleges that I could work off of (and a list of college mascots that I could use to check my searches), I looked up their mascots and stored the results on Google Sheets. Out of the 45 schools listed, I could only find 27 that either had an official mascot, or some semblance of a mascot. Brandeis University has two mascots—Ollie the Owl and The Judge—so that makes 28 mascots I’m dealing with total.

a chart of all 45 colleges and universities in metropolitan Boston that were listed on Wikipedia

Wikipedia says that the bee is BAC's informal mascot, but there was enough representation of it that I counted it as a valid input. (Also, like, it makes sense for an architectural college anyway.) (1/3)

In hindsight, marking NEC's mascot as "Not confirmed" isn't really true, considering that there's overwhelming evidence that they consider the penguin as their mascot. By "uncanny resemblance," I meant that they clearly look like penguins, not that they both look like each other. I'm too lazy to go back and edit the picture again. (2/3)

Some sources say John Harvard (the Pilgrim) is their official mascot, some say that he isn't. I know I'm stretching the facts a *lot* here, but I firmly believe a turkey deserves a position in this sleepless pursuit of a project more than some dude from the 1600's does. (3/3)

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Taxonomic classifications

After deleting the mascot-less colleges, I scraped together the closest taxonomic approximations I could get for each mascot. Depending on how specific the school is about their mascot, I either got a specific classification all the way down to the species, or I had to use a more general classification with something like genus or family, for example.

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Lasell University and the University of Massachusetts at Boston won’t be connected to the tree because they unfortunately lack any formal taxonomic classification.

Making the tree

After performing extensive research on the process of making a phylogenetic tree (aka googling answers from biology-related subreddits), I found the tools I needed.

• Taxonomy Common Tree by the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). Based on the taxa that you submit, if it’s in NCBI’s Taxonomy Database then the site will build a representation of your inputs, and show any shared ancestors between them.
• Interactive Tree of Life (iTOL). Once you save the results from the NCBI site as a file that’s compatible with iTOL, it will actually build a phylogenetic tree based off of the file’s contents. You can then save the tree as an image file, which I did and then polished up in an image-editing software.

The hierarchical list generated by NCBI's site of the different taxonomic groups that the mascots are in. (1/2)

The actual tree generated by iTOL, unedited. (2/2)

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Polishing up the final product

I used Medibang Paint to make it all pretty.

Some small issues I have with the final design is that the iTOL tree didn’t add a label for Elephantidae and Canis lupus for some reason, so I had to wedge Tufts University and Hult Intl Business School Boston into tight spaces. It isn’t really ✨aesthetic✨, but whatever.

Extras + Final comments

• There are 16 mammals, 9 birds, 2 uncategorized, and 1 bug represented in this tree. I wonder if there’s a general preference for mammal and bird mascots nationwide, or if this is just an occurrence within the metro Boston collegiate community. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a more widespread pattern.
• The two phylums represented are Chordata and Arthropoda. The ratio of chordates to arthropods is a whopping 25:1, with BAC’s (informal) bee mascot being the lone representative of the arthropods. Ironically, Arthropoda is the largest phylum in the animal kingdom.
• I lost sleep in the past two days because of this. Was it worth it? Maybe? I’m not even a biology major. Idk why I made this.
• I showed the tree to Fatima when I was done with it. After a few seconds of silence, she said, “This is such an MIT student thing to do.” This is the best compliment I’ve received in the past few weeks.