Evolutionary Trees

One of the things that I am interested in is determining when and where different species arose from others, and under what kinds of circumstances the transformations took place. To be sure, a great part of my understanding of this process can be accomplished by studying a textbook about evolution. But I’d like to know how the different species of animal and plant life arose, as well as the limits to this knowledge that biological scientists are faced with. For example, what is the origin of the common American opossum, the house cat, or the mockingbird (our Florida “State Bird”)? Do the species that they “split” from still exist, when and where did the splits occur, and what caused the splits? Tens of thousands of distinct species of currently existing animal life have already been enumerated. And many more extinct species as well. What, in detail, are their relationships with each other? I’d like to get hold of a “family tree” for species that show where they came from. But more than that, I’d like to have access to a source that reveals the “nodes” of time in which species evolved from others, and the degree of successful research toward explaining these changes.

Understanding general principles of evolution is one thing: knowing details is another. By analogy, I may learn all sorts of principles pertaining to the field of astronomy, but what if I want to learn specific information about, say, Vega, the Orion Nebula, or M88? This is the sort of question I am asking about the origin of species. I guess that, so far, I haven’t been looking in the right places for my answers! Does anybody out there in blog-land have any suggestions? I can’t believe that materials don’t exist that provide exactly the kind of species-evolutionary trees I am searching for!