In Search of the Tallest Family Tree

[EpiglottalAxolotl]

We all know that Chicken Smoothie likes to make pets that reference other past pets. It's part of the charm, and the reason why we have 2nd generation litters and GUPPS pets and Easter bunny reimaginings of existing animals and everything else. But what is the longest such chain of inspiration?

To clarify, I'm not just asking what pets get referenced the most often. That's simple enough to find, and it's probably one of the 2009 dogs that's been around since the beginning. (Sunback, perhaps? I'm not sure, I'm fairly new here still.) Rather, I'm asking the question of: how many times is a pet released that's inspired by an existing pet, and then a third pet is released that's inspired by the second pet (and only indirectly by the first!), and then a fourth pet is inspired by the third one, and so on.

This question came to mind when I was pondering my favorite second-generation litter, the eastern dragons from July of 2023: a second-generation litter in which one of the parents was a GUPPS. Since a PPS outcome from that litter received a GUPPS version last year during Advent, this means that we have a GUPPS of a 2nd gen of a GUPPS of an original pet, four layers deep, as you can see in this family tree:

I had far too much fun drawing the little dragon icons for this tree, and honestly half the reason I'm posting this thread is to show them off. But I'm also genuinely curious: are there any larger family trees, ones that go deep as well as just wide? Obviously, any 3rd-generation litter is going to be wider than this, with four entire litters worth of pets in the first generation. But how often do derivative pets then go on to get their own derivatives?

[Fluffmuffler]

I don't know that this is exactly what you're asking for, but I have made it a bit of a hobby to make family trees for different 2nd/3rd gen litters, with the goal of putting one together for all of them, and some are rather sizeable! ...but only because I include everyone (that I'm aware of 😂) Granted, I hadn't considered adding, like, the Easter rabbits, or other pets, that might be based on them 🤔

In any case, here's one of the bigger ones I've done. Lots of GUPPS's in this one!

[EpiglottalAxolotl]

Yes, that's a pretty good example of what I'm talking about! Taking the 2009 PPS with the black swirls around the tail as our starting point, we get a depth of 5 for the November 2011 litter: a 2nd gen from a GUPPS from a 2nd gen from a GUPPS from the original pet. Nice find!

(The one thing I'm not sure about there is how to include that one that's labeled Christmas 2015. Is that supposed to be a late addition to the original 2009 litter? That's not a relationship that my current system is equipped to handle.)

Anyway, I'm working on a tree for the teal and white cats from October 2017 right now. That one doesn't get very deep that I'm aware of, but three out of the initial litter of four outcomes have some form of descendants, and one of them has two unrelated derivations (a 2nd gen and an April Fools mashup).

[Fluffmuffler]

Oh, the Christmas '15 label is for the GUPPS of the November '15 kid! I was running a little low on space in that area 😂 That said, there was one year we had a set of 'lost littermates' for the advent calendar, of which you can see some in this tree (hopefully that link works,) but I don't think any of them are parents in a 3rd gen litter, to the best of my recollection 🤔

[EpiglottalAxolotl]

Just to clarify: I see two things labeled "Christmas 2015", one being the GUPPS of the November 2015 and the other being, as far as I can tell, an actual Lost Littermate to the May 2009 litter.

[Fluffmuffler]

Oop, yup, missed that one! I was too busy checking the labels below that I forgot some had it over top, my bad 😂

[WelcomeToWonderland]

Family Tree Pet Group

Here's the one family I've been trying to get all of them! I don't have a specific family tree but you can see how many I have so far. It'll have 50 total when it's completed.

[EpiglottalAxolotl]

Found another one that's not quite as tall as the dragonfruit dragons, but does have more connections: the March 2014 biopunk butterfly-wolf.



This one got a second-gen litter just a few months later, and also got remixed for April Fools in 2021. The second-gen litter was then referenced by Advent pets in two separate years. (No icon tree for this one, because these guys are hard to draw!)