Alex Wright


Tree of Life

April 19, 2006

Jim Mason pointed me to the Tree of Life, an ambitious Web-based project allowing biologists to collaborate on capturing the entire phylogeny of life on earth.

The site lets you explore all the major taxa on the evolutionary tree, from eukaryotes all the way up through, say, the checkered elephant shrew.

My only beef is that they could be doing something a lot more imaginative with the interface. The depth of data here seems to call out for some kind of hyperbolic tree browser or other dynamic widget.

Still, this seems like a solid start to a useful project, and a win for the phylogenetic systematics crowd.

> The Tree of Life project


File under: Informatics

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