Tree Of (Animal) Life, With A Difference

This one is strictly cladistic and shows not intermediate forms, but synapomorphies. I want one for tetrapods. Or vertebrates in general.

That is a nice one.I have been interested in tree of life diagrams since around the 7th grade. I traced one the was in one of my books and put it on a notebook divider for my science class. This was a simple tree that showed the phyla. I couldn't draw for shit so I just had the names at the end of each branch. The science teacher saw it and asked me to make mimeograph copies for him. I wonder how many years he handed out that simple diagram as a teaching aid?We are finally at a stage with personal computers and the internet that millions of people around the globe are adding to digital trees of life. Sometimes, I lose a whole day following the patterns of branching and inter-relatedness, on some of the tree of life databases.Another graphic tree I like is at Evogeneao's Tree of Life. I got one of their shirts with a dragonfly as my 302,024,453rd cousin 109,629,857 times removed.

I saw this yesterday but did not have a chance to read it until this morning.This is quite extraordinary and exciting for those who are compelled to know the name, find information about the life history, understand the evolutionary history and relationships of all the organisms that we encounter in our lives.It will take a while to explore and evaluate how well this tree of life performs in this role for biologists and naturalists. (+Video) ‘Tree of Life’ including 2.3 million species released onlineThis is a link to the tree. It took me a couple minutes to figure out how to zero in on something specific. Open Tree of Life

Do you have any idea how this tree is actually constructed? The websites 'about' sections seem to be woefully uninformative. I ask because this sort of project is always going to be a bit difficult, since there are parts of the tree so unresolved that there isn't really such a thing as a consensus. I was looking at one such bit (the basal relationships among eukaryotes) and noticed that they've gone for what looks to me like a very unorthodox topology (Amoebozoa sister to a 'Bikont' clade, and Parabasalia nested within Euglenozoa). I can't figure out how the tree is put together, and so why they chose that particular tree.

So far, I am disappointed by the lack of information too. I am guessing, but I think it was put together without input from experts from every specialty. The article says that it is a combination of tens of thousands of smaller trees and a collaboration of 11 institutions.This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together, said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University. Think of it as Version 1.0.I have not found it to be very useful when looking at the Insect Order Odonata. Rather than showing actual taxonomic/cladistic relationships it just is a list of the standard groupings of the major clades. When you get down to species, again just a list, and not a species account or photos. It says to look it up on Encyclopedia of Life, which is a better "Tree of Life" for a lot of the Insecta. I think this will always be a problem, especially when the taxonomy is primarily based on morphology. Molecular phylogenies seem to be be replacing the older morphological phylogenies as the technology matures, at least in my specialty of Odonates.One of my colleges recently recieved an $800K grant for molecular work. (She was a principal researcher on a huge molecular project for all the Insecta that was published recently in Science.) Since this is version 1.0 we can hope it will improve. In my mind, it would seem like a really difficult problem to figure out the basal relationships, especially if there has been a lot of horizontal genetic transfer.