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First draft of the “tree of life” for the 2.3M named organisms released [pdf] (pnas.org)
76 points by irl_zebra on Sept 19, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



Here's a browser for the actual tree: 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). 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.


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


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


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.


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


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

Only? That seems like a pretty good start.


Yes, but... there are still an estimated 8.7 million unnamed species out there.




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