You also visualize a lawn when you see the fossil record represented as vertical parallel lines. (You have posted such pictures.) That's a question-begging reconstruction which assumes what it tries to show, that nothing is related to anything else.
The scale of similarities appears non-linear, yes, but that's because nothing is a zero. Common descent and all that. The daffodil is not totally unrelated to you. Nevertheless, nothing is as related to you as the chimp.
I do recall that chart, it shows Time one way and morphological distance the other. The Darwin prediction looks like a tree, the fossil evidence looks like a lawn.
For lurkers, you can see the pictures here.