![]() ![]() Beautiful big dataĭr Wong, from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford, said: “By developing new algorithms for visualisation and data processing, and combining them with ‘big data’ gathered from multiple sources, we’ve created something beautiful. In a paper published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Drs Wong and Rosindell present the result of over ten years of work, gradually creating what they regard as “the Google Earth of biology”. OneZoom was developed by Imperial College London biodiversity researcher Dr James Rosindell and University of Oxford evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong. The explorer also includes images of over 85,000 species, plus, where known, their vulnerability to extinction. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in to any species and explore its relationships with others, in a seamless visualisation on a single web page. We have worked hard to make the tree easy to explore for everyone, and we also hope to send a powerful message: that much of our biodiversity is under threat. The OneZoom explorer – available at – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. The anatomist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was one of the first people to draw evolutionary trees that tried to show how major groups of life forms are related.OneZoom is a one-stop site for exploring all life on Earth, its evolutionary history, and how much of it is threatened with extinction. While Darwin (1859) showed that all life on Earth is related in a single evolutionary tree, he did little to map out its branches. Until the advent of cheap and efficient gene sequencing technology in the 21st century, appearance was usually all evolutionary biologists had to go on. The Australian marsupial pouched moles (more closely related to kangaroos), African golden moles (more closely related to aardvarks), African mole rats (rodents) and the Eurasian and North American talpid moles (beloved of gardeners, and more closely related to hedgehogs than these other “moles”) all evolved down a similar path. Moles evolved as blind, burrowing creatures at least four times, on different continents, on different branches of the mammal tree. Squid and fish are actually separated by more than half a billion years of evolution. Birds, bats and the extinct pterosaurs have, or had, bony wings for flying, but their ancestors all had front legs for walking on the ground instead. Animals can look amazingly alike because they have evolved to do a similar job or live in a similar way. But it has fewer tricks up its sleeve than you might think. It may appear that evolution endlessly invents new solutions, almost without limits. Our research showed they were far less likely to live near each other compared to species linked by DNA data. In other words, previous trees showed several species were related based on appearance. Evolutionary trees based on DNA data were two-thirds more likely to match with the location of the species compared with traditional evolution maps. We looked at evolutionary trees based on appearance or on molecules for 48 groups of animals and plants, including bats, dogs, monkeys, lizards and pine trees. The location of species is another strong indicator they are related: species that live near each other are more likely to share a family tree.įor the first time, our recent paper cross-referenced location, DNA data and appearance for a range of animals and plants. Darwin noted that animals and plants that appeared to share the closest common ancestry were often found close together geographically. ![]() There is another important line of evidence that was familiar to Darwin and his contemporaries. Molecular phylogenies show that mammals as different in appearance as aardvarks, manatees, elephant shrews and elephants are really close cousins. ![]()
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