TimeTree

People are always asking me for the source of those nice t-shirts that illustrate how long we've diverged from a given species. I think the name must be hard to remember: they're at evogeneao.com. Now there's a little software widget that will be just as neat-o.

Look up TimeTree, and remember to show it to the kids. This is a page with a simple premise: type in the name of two taxa (it will accept common names, but may give you a list of scientific names to narrow the search), and then it looks them up in the public gene databases and gives you a best estimate of how long ago their last common ancestor lived.

Grasshoppers and I, for instance, shared a many-times-great grandpa 981 million years ago. My zebrafish and I are practically cousins, with our last shared ancestor living a mere 454 million years ago. Hey, tree, we've been apart for 1407 million years, how's it going? Sparrow! Long time no see! 325 million years, huh?

You get the idea. It's great for getting the big perspective. The kids will pester you all the time for dates. Especially since…it's got an iPhone app! Get on the App Store on your smart phone or iPad and search for TimeTree — it's totally free (except for the cost of owning such a gadget, of course).

Oh, and once you're done entertaining the children and yourself, it's actually a serious tool. Tap on the results and it'll take you to all the scientific details: breakdown of mitochondrial vs. nuclear date estimates, source papers, all that sort of thing.

For details on how it works, there's also a published paper:

Hedges SB, Dudley J, Kumar S (2006) TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms. Bioinformatics 22(23):2971-2972.

Look, a cat! 92 million years.

More like this

FUUUUUN! TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular…
I'm sure by now you've heard of the ginormous spider web that was spun in Texas. The thing was huge -- 200 yards long -- and it was spun by multiple different species. That interspecific collaboration got Bill Poser thinking, so he blogged about it at Language Log: The web covers hundreds of…
The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Let me first congratulate Ms…
This cat is going to be insufferable You may have heard we've got this satanic feline padding about the house now, getting into mischief -- she has discovered my collection of cephalopodiana, and her favorite toy is one of my stuffed octopuses that she wrestles and bats around the floor. It's like…

I agree with your converse cheap opinion, I think so, I believe that in the future you will be very as. Please try to.If cheap converse slipper you do not see the article in the good, then it loses the author's own Converse jack purcell experience, discount converse skid star I think the good thing is we go to share with everyone, so we converse basketball can get spiritual satisfactionï¼I agree with your opinion, I think so, I believe that in the future you will be very as. converse one star Please try to.I'm glad to hear from you. Now let me tell you something about our city. Nantong is trying to set up a national civilized city. converse pro starWe middle school students are also doing some things cheap converse all star for it. We are all polite to our teachers.

I agree with your converse cheap opinion, I think so, I believe that in the future you will be very as. Please try to.If cheap converse slipper you do not see the article in the good, then it loses the author's own Converse jack purcell experience, discount converse skid star I think the good thing is we go to share with everyone, so we converse basketball can get spiritual satisfactionï¼I agree with your opinion, I think so, I believe that in the future you will be very as. converse one star Please try to.I'm glad to hear from you. Now let me tell you something about our city. Nantong is trying to set up a national civilized city. converse pro starWe middle school students are also doing some things cheap converse all star for it. We are all polite to our teachers.