A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies. In the current version, data from nearly 500 evolutionary timelines has been assembled into a single, searchable view of all known life forms; From the CSM report: Building the computer code and compiling the data took three years, and involved collaborators from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the Web development firm Interrobang, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and George Washington University. "Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," said Cody Hinchliff, a scientist from the University of Idaho, in the announcement.

Comments

Re:Christian Science Monitor

[TapeCutter]

I have been atheist/agnostic for over 50yrs, CSM has been in print for 100. In my experience CSM understands (and chronicles) science better than most MSM rags. Unlike Isaac Newton, I have never heard them spewing religious nonsense at their audience.