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Time Tree of All Earth
Life June 10, 2009 New initiative traces the beginning of species' life on Earth http://live.psu.edu/story/40116 - - - Excerpts: Beginning this week, scientists and nonscientists now have easy access to information about when living species and their ancestors originated, information that previously was difficult to find or inaccessible. Free access to the information is part of the new Time- tree of Life initiative developed by Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, and Sudhir Kumar, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University. The Timetree of Life project debuted this week with the simultaneous release of a major online resource called "TimeTreeWeb" (http://www.timetree.org), and a book titled "The Timetree of Life" (Oxford University Press) ... - - - Time Tree Resources http://www.timetree.org/resources.php - - - - - - Time Tree -- The Timescale of Life http://www.timetree.org/book.php - - - - - - Adobe file with sizable graphic displaying all life on a timetree http://www.timetree.org/poster/timetree24x32.pdf - - - Nobel laureate James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, comments in his foreword to the book, "I look in wonder at The Timetree of Life, at the breadth of life that it covers, and the extraordin- ary data presented in it." "The ultimate goal of the Timetree of Life initiative is to chart the timescale of life -- to discover when each species and all their ancestors originated, all the way back to the origin of life some four billion years ago." ... "The TimeTreeWeb tool belongs to a new genre of resources that lets anyone easily mine knowledge previously locked up in technical research articles, without needing to know the jargon of the field." ... "For example, if you type in 'cat' and 'dog' ... the program will navigate through the timetree of life to the point where the cat and dog species split, and it will find all the studies bearing on that divergence. Within a few seconds, you will learn that your pet cat and dog diverged in evolutionary time about 50 to 60 million years ago." ... One fifth of "The Timetree of Life" book contains new data, published for the first time, which fill many gaps in the family tree of life down to the taxonomic level of "family" (groups of species). For example, the book's chapter on stingrays and sharks is the first published timetree analysis of the existing molecular data about these animals. Almost all of the previously published data re- viewed in the book became known only recently, in the hundreds of scientific articles published dur- ing the past five or ten years. ... Over 800 studies currently are searchable in the TimeTreeWeb, with more being added continu- ously. ... Each chapter of "The Timetree of Life" book is a review of the evolutionary history of the families within a particular group of organisms, such as mosses, ferns, fungi, beetles, sea urchins, frogs and toads, turtles, owls, primates, and many others. The chapters each contain a photograph of a representative organism, a color-coded time- tree showing how the families are related and when they split from their closest relative, and a table with divergence times. ... Support for developing TimeTreeWeb has come from the U. S. National Science Foundation, the Astrobiology Institute of the U. S. National Aero- nautics and Space Administration, the Science Foundation of Arizona, and the Biodesign Insti- tute of ASU. - - - end excerpts - - - - - - |
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