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Tree of Life (tolweb.org)
90 points by partycoder on March 12, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



It's such a shame that the project website hasn't been updated anymore since '11 due to funding problems. It was a huge help during my studies and I enjoyed just browsing around on it.


There is also http://eol.org/


This is very cool!

But damn, it's complicated. Consider the root.[0] As I vaguely understand it, evolution of eukaryotes involved multiple fusions of separate lines. The basic cell came from one line. And nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts from other lines. I gather that there was at first symbiosis, which then became permanent. And perhaps other organelles came from other lines.

Nuclei and mitochondria must have integrated first, because both plants and animals have them. And then plants got chloroplasts.

I wonder whether relationships are clear enough yet to include in the tree.

0) http://tolweb.org/Life_on_Earth/1


This one is much easier to use and you can get common ancestors (toggle the 'relate' switch) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/labs/lab/evolution/research#/ev... What I love about it is typing in two things that seem fairly distant like humans and fruit flies and then seeing it zoom in quite way to show that they come off a relatively late branch.


Great website which I used many times to check the precise species appearing in photos I made. Unfortunately the project seems to have stopped updating over 9 years ago (if the news page is a good indicator).


If you like this, you should try http://www.onezoom.org/




Seems not to be completely up to date. Eukaryotes are increasingly viewed as a subset of Archaea, instead of Archaea a subset of Prokaryotes.

See for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464739/


TIL: there is a genus called Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(genus)


It seems Chaos is closely related to slimemolds, which do seem similar... (slimemolds are cooler though)


You can explore the tree of life including extinct branches. It is incredible to see that for each live branch there are many branches that didn't make it.


I have fond memories working on an interactive visualization on a MS Surface table using this data. Great to see TOL still being used!


just found this up-to-date, interactive version of the Tree of Life > http://lifemap.univ-lyon1.fr/




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