Tree of Life Explorer

I love exploring the tree of life in different ways, and I appreciate the other links here in the comments. My favourite one hasn't been mentioned yet: https://www.onezoom.org/life.html

It's fun to see the different UX considerations and possibilities that can go into this space.

Also: http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

The most interesting part to me, is the root of the tree of life, or LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor

I quite like the radial timeline on the visualisation shared by OP. A while back I was looking for exactly this kind of visualization and stumbled upon https://lifemap.univ-lyon1.fr

Also check out my hobby project: https://relatedhow.kodare.com/

It's not as fancy looking, but it's a lot more complete.

For a complementary take on this, I'd recommend 'The Ancestor's Tale' [0] by Richard Dawkins. It goes backwards through time, focussing on the points where our history branches from a common ancestor to different modern 'cousins'. In other words, similarly to the tree of life explorer, it's looking at the non-leaf nodes (the branching points) inside the tree of life, albeit with a fixed path, but adding info about what actually changed at the branching point. So we successively meet other hominids, primates, non-primate mammals, non-mammal chordates, non-chordate animals, etc etc, each with many different sub-divisions. It's quite a unique perspective, and brings home just how extensive the tree of life actually is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale

Fantastic! I think that I prefer their visualization to the alternatives that have been suggested here (all worth exploring, of course).

I have been looking for a good tree-of-life poster for a while, so I was disappointed to read this on their website. I didn't know that the EU was such a tangled mess of regulation.

> We ship our posters throughout North America and internationally to most countries. Unfortunately, due to regulations that have increased shipping costs and complexities, we are unable to ship to countries within the EU at this time.

Some of these relationships are really interesting.

For example, according to this, an American Robin is more closely related to the Tyrannosaurus rex than the Tyrannosaurus rex was to, say, a Brachiosaur.

I guess I knew birds were closely related to dinosaurs but I didn't think of it quite that way.

The mass extinction intervals are also a little concerning when you think of where we are now. It looks like right about now is when there would be another one, if there was some regularity to them.

So cool! I especially like the "122-millionth cousin, 28 million times removed" description and the fact that it has many different pictures for "Human".

Of course there is no single tree of life - the roots and branches depend on a particular set of genetic properties being measured; pick a different set, you'll get a different tree.

Is there a tool somewhere that lets you explore the directed graph of life?

(I'd say DAG of life, but I'm not sure if you can have a useful representation here without cycles.)

For a different, more quantitative perspective, take a look at timetree.org. Timetree.org makes it very easy to see the evolutionary times between pairs of organisms.

So, all the data is in HTML format in the page and the browser has to generate an SVG for each frame?