hide random home http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
The Tree of Life Home Page

The Tree of Life

A distributed Internet project containing
information about phylogeny and biodiversity

David R. Maddison and Wayne P. Maddison
University of Arizona

with many contributors

Go to the root of the Tree of Life.
To go quickly to a specific group of organism, use the Express Page.

Note: The home site of the Tree of Life will be temporarily off-line 14-15 March 1996, in order to upgrade the server. Note that it WILL be available 7-8 March (we hope), contrary to the earlier note. We will post updates here, as we learn details from the server gurus.

Introduction

The Tree of Life is a project designed to contain information about the phylogenetic relationships of organisms, to link biological information available on the Internet in the form of a phylogenetic navigator, and to illustrate the diversity and unity of living organisms.

We hope that this project will provide a map to biological information that can be used by researchers, teachers, and students, and that, as it grows, it will provide a forum for those who wish to share knowledge about the diversity of earth's organisms.

The Tree of Life is still in development. Of the more than 940 pages currently in the Tree, housed on seven computers, a few (for example, the basal pages on beetles, jumping spiders, and terrestrial vertebrates ) are nearing completion, whereas many are just beginning. As the preliminary pages are fleshed out, alternative phylogenetic hypotheses will be discussed, references added, information about the organisms provided, and so on. Many new pages will also be attached to the Tree. Some of this will be completed as we work on our "branches" of the Tree, but the majority will develop as others attach their branches about the organisms they study and their thought on phylogeny to the structure. In addition, the basic system itself is evolving as it grows.

At this site, the home of the Tree, are a number of documents that provide basic information about the project:

A description of the Tree of Life project.
Goals of the Tree of Life.
Questions and answers about the Tree of Life.
Help in using the Tree of Life.
This page contains information about navigating through the Tree of Life, including the function of buttons in the toolbars.
Glossary of terms used in the Tree of Life.
Express page.
This page contains links to the various tools used for finding particular pages on the Tree. The page also contains links to commonly accessed groups.
Search page.
This page contains a search facility, for finding organisms by name anywhere on the Tree, or for finding particular text.
Sample pages.
This page contains links to some sample branches of the Tree, which can serve as places to start browsing the Tree.
Picture Sampler.
This page allows you to view a collection of randomly chosen pictures from the Tree of Life project.
Participants in the Tree of Life project.
This page gives a partial list of the people who have agreed to author pages and coordinate parts of the Tree of Life.
How Tree of Life pages are created.
How to contribute to the Tree of Life.
This page gives information about contributing to the Tree, either as a coordinator, or by contributing information or pictures.
A history of the Tree.
Tree News.
News about recent developments in the Tree of Life project.
Plans for the near future - things to be done.
An introduction to phylogenetic biology.
This page contains some basic information about the nature of phylogenies, how they are inferred, the current state of our knowledge, and why such knowledge is important.
Acknowledgements.
Other WWW sites that deal with biological diversity.
(The Tree is under construction. Please have patience: the real Tree took over 3,000,000,000 years to grow!)
Warning! If you wish to cite a page in this project in a formal publication, you should not cite any page that contains the icon. In these instances you should cite the original publications. This project is still under construction, so in some cases the phylogenies and other information presented are not the most well-supported hypothesis available today; instead, they represent information that we had easy access to. If a page lacks a "Page Under Construction" icon, we suggest you contact the author or us regarding whether or how it might be cited in a publication.
The prototype Tree of Life project first went online 16 November 1994.
The project was first formally announced on 5 January 1996.

This is the 44870th access of this page since 4 August 1995.

Copyright © 1995 by David R. Maddison and Wayne P. Maddison.
All rights reserved.

David Maddison
Department of Entomology
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 U.S.A.

Wayne Maddison
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 U.S.A.

If you have any inquiries about the project, please e-mail us at tree@ag.arizona.edu.

(The best WWW browser for the Tree of Life is Netscape)

Judged one of the "1,001 Best Web Sites" by PC Computing magazine, December 1995.

Planet Science Site of the Day