Circular Tree Of Life Is Wiki For All Evolutionary History

The entire history of living things – most of everything we know so far, that is – has been included in the "Open Tree of Life". This is a new resource, open and free to use by anyone in the world, created by a group of 11 different institutions. Their goal was to reconstruct "the phylogenetic relationships that unite all lineages" in as complete a manner as possible. A real comprehensive tree of life was the goal, and the release today is the result.

The Open Tree of Life can be explored and – in the near future – edited. We're to understand that the Open Tree of Life is (this afternoon) experiencing a high server load and is unable to accept comments, but they'll be up again soon!

The Open Tree of Life aims to construct a fully "comprehensive, dynamic, and digitally-available tree of life" using the data already published by phylogenic trees of life from around the world.

The image you see above is a visualization of the work researchers have done on this fully operational tree of life thus far. To see each of the full-sized graphics, tap the image thumbnails below.

The charts here can be found in the full paper (as quoted below) – Figure 1: Phylogenies representing the synthetic tree. The depicted tree is limited to lineages containing at least 500 descendants. A. Colors represent proportion of lineages represented in NCBI databases; B. Colors represent the amount of diversity measured by number of descendant tips; C. Dark lineages have at least one representative in an input source tree.

You can find our more about this tree of life in the paper "Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life" as published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's bioRxiv under code doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/012260. Don't be fooled by the publish date of July 29th, 2015 – they've been working on this one for an extended period of time.