4 ms·

First draft of the “tree of life” for the 2.3M named organisms released [pdf]

76 points by irl_zebra 11y ago

pavpanchekha 11y ago
It's stunning to think that we know enough biology to make a good guess at the entire billion-year history of life itself, possibly the history of all life in the universe. In one sense, producing this tree is a major goal of biology, a battle fought by Linneus, Mendel, Darwin, and thousands of biologists in the centuries between.
- mkempe 11y ago
  Starting with the father of biology, Aristotle, and the father of botany, Theophrastus (who was Aristotle's best pupil).
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
This is made even more cool by the fact that it's fully open source. Not only is the actual tree open for community contributions and comments, but the technology stack is also open source: http://opentreeoflife.github.io http://opentreeoflife.github.io
skybrian 11y ago
"GenBank contains DNA sequences for ∼411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species." Only? That seems like a pretty good start.
- tsotha 11y ago
  Yes, but... there are still an estimated 8.7 million unnamed species out there.
lambda 11y ago
Here's a browser for the actual tree: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org https://tree.opentreeoflife.org. It is a little slow to load right now, as this has been posted to Reddit recently. For those of you, like me, who may not be very familiar with modern phylogeny and taxonomy, here's the path I charted down to "Homo Sapiens". Check out under Eukaryota (which includes plants, animals, fungi, and a bunch of single celled organisms), then Opisthokonta. Under that you'll find Nucletmycea, which contains Fungi, finally getting down to a more familiar classification. Another branch under Opisthokonta is Holozoa, which you can then trace down to "Choanomonada + Metazoa", down to "Metazoa", which Wikipedia tells me is another name for "Animalia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metazoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metazoa). You can trace down under there to Bilateria (via a few nodes with multiple groups, I've elided those nodes from now on), to Deuterostomia, to Chordata, Craniata, Verbrata, Gnathostomata, Teleostomi, Euteleostomi, Sarcopterygii, Dipnotetrapodomorpha, Tetrapoda, Amniota, Mammalia, Theria, Eutheria, Euarchontoglires, Primates, Haplorrhini, Simiiformes, Catarrhini, Hominoidea, Hominidae, Homininae, Homo, and finally Homo Sapiens.
- ninov 11y ago
  Direct link to Homo sapiens: http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/Homo-sapiens http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/H... (loads even slower than the home page)

76 points by irl_zebra 11y ago

It's stunning to think that we know enough biology to make a good guess at the entire billion-year history of life itself, possibly the history of all life in the universe. In one sense, producing this tree is a major goal of biology, a battle fought by Linneus, Mendel, Darwin, and thousands of biologists in the centuries between.

mkempe 11y ago
Starting with the father of biology, Aristotle, and the father of botany, Theophrastus (who was Aristotle's best pupil).

semi-extrinsic 11y ago

This is made even more cool by the fact that it's fully open source. Not only is the actual tree open for community contributions and comments, but the technology stack is also open source: http://opentreeoflife.github.io http://opentreeoflife.github.io

skybrian 11y ago

"GenBank contains DNA sequences for ∼411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species." Only? That seems like a pretty good start.

tsotha 11y ago
Yes, but... there are still an estimated 8.7 million unnamed species out there.

lambda 11y ago

Here's a browser for the actual tree: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org https://tree.opentreeoflife.org. It is a little slow to load right now, as this has been posted to Reddit recently. For those of you, like me, who may not be very familiar with modern phylogeny and taxonomy, here's the path I charted down to "Homo Sapiens". Check out under Eukaryota (which includes plants, animals, fungi, and a bunch of single celled organisms), then Opisthokonta. Under that you'll find Nucletmycea, which contains Fungi, finally getting down to a more familiar classification. Another branch under Opisthokonta is Holozoa, which you can then trace down to "Choanomonada + Metazoa", down to "Metazoa", which Wikipedia tells me is another name for "Animalia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metazoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metazoa). You can trace down under there to Bilateria (via a few nodes with multiple groups, I've elided those nodes from now on), to Deuterostomia, to Chordata, Craniata, Verbrata, Gnathostomata, Teleostomi, Euteleostomi, Sarcopterygii, Dipnotetrapodomorpha, Tetrapoda, Amniota, Mammalia, Theria, Eutheria, Euarchontoglires, Primates, Haplorrhini, Simiiformes, Catarrhini, Hominoidea, Hominidae, Homininae, Homo, and finally Homo Sapiens.

ninov 11y ago
Direct link to Homo sapiens: http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/Homo-sapiens http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/H... (loads even slower than the home page)