It's not the best way to kick of a new blog theme -- on Friday night with a half-hearted entry -- but I promised last week that I would begin Phylogeny Fridays today, so I need to deliver. For the first ever Phylogeny Friday, we have the greatest phylogeny of them all, the Tree of Life. Go explore the site, it's freakin' awesome.
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Phylogeny Friday -- 27 June 2008
When Phylogeny Friday last made an appearance on this blog, we were exploring the vertebrates.
Over at my old site, I lamented the apparent death of distance based tree building algorithms.
Yeah, it is. They even have a random organism button...
It is a great site, I've spent quite a bit of time looking around there. As a microbiologist however, I do not care for that tree image, it does a poor job representing the diversity in the bacterial and archaeal branches. I understand it is primarily designed as an aid to navigation but that does not justify the distortion.
All of the organisms in the image shown above are eukaryotes, which isn't very representative of life on earth. They should have a direct link to archaea, eubacteria, and eukaryotes on the main page. They could then include representative organisms from some of the better studied taxa (a vertebrate, an arthropod, an angiosperm, etc).
Chalk it all up to taxonomic bias.