The tree of life

Open Tree of Life

I remember being young in school and learning about taxonomy and tree of life. I remember looking at the small tree in the text book and thinking about how cool it would be if you could do this for every animal. Enter Open Tree of Life. An attempt to combine all phylogenetic trees into one comprehensive branching tree which contains all of life. The real power here is that it is open. Anyone can contribute a tree. Life covers such a wide variety of field it will take the talent of many experts if this is going to be anywhere near comprehensive. Being open all the data is available for anyone to use as they wish. Go ahead and have a browse. Put a species in the search box and see what it is closely related to.

The tree of life

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