
First draft of the “tree of life” for the 2.3M named organisms released [pdf] - irl_zebra
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf
======
lambda
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
Direct link to Homo sapiens:
[http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/H...](http://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/opentree3.0@776755/Homo-
sapiens) (loads even slower than the home page)

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semi-extrinsic
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)

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

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skybrian
"GenBank contains DNA sequences for ∼411,000 species, only 22% of estimated
named species."

Only? That seems like a pretty good start.

~~~
tsotha
Yes, but... there are still an estimated 8.7 million _unnamed_ species out
there.

