Using data from the General Embryological Information Service, we describe and analyze global trends in organism use during the 1950s and 1960s, visualized with topographic landscape diagrams. While the overall trend for developmental biology has been toward greater use of mammalian and avian systems, our visualization tools allow us to focus our analysis on specific research areas, such as fertilization or regeneration, where local trends show strong entrenchment of non-mammalian organisms. Juxtaposing these kinds of cases to the broader move toward mammalian systems, we suggest that the broader trend can be explained by a desire to make specific research problems more directly relevant to human biomedicine, while limited access to the phenomena in question played a key role in organismal entrenchment in specific research areas. Using organismal landscapes generated from the GEIS creates new opportunities to analyze the contingent factors that drive continuity and change in a biologist’s choice of research organism.
