Tree of Life: grand opening

[David Maddison]

The Tree of Life Project is having its grand opening today, 5 January 1996.

The project is a collection of WWW pages.  Each page contains information
about a group of organisms: a phylogeny, introduction, characteristics,
discussion of phylogenetic relationships, references, and so on.  The pages
are linked together (with, for example, the terminal taxon name Green
Plants on the Crown Eukaryotes page being a hypertext link to the Green
Plants page), so that combined they form a phylogenetic tree of all living
organisms.

The eventual goal is to have this Tree complete to the species level in
many different groups of organisms.  This is being accomplished with the
help of many collaborators: there are currently over 120 contributors to
the project.

The pages are distributed over the web, so that different branches of the
Tree reside on different computers.  Today there are 948 pages in the Tree,
on seven different computers on two continents.  Both the number of pages,
and the completeness of each page, will grow through time.

While the project has been online for a little over a year, it has never
been formally announced.  For this grand opening, numerous contributors
produced pages of various groups including vertebrates, frogs, green
plants, beetles, jumping spiders, etc.  There is now a searchable index of
taxon names.  And lots more pictures.

 The URL for the home page of the project is:

    http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html


David Maddison
Wayne Maddison



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David R. Maddison                PHONE: (520) 621 9781
Department of Entomology         FAX: (520) 621 1150
University of Arizona            Internet:beetle at ag.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ   85721

correspondence for Tree of Life:  tree at ag.arizona.edu
Tree of Life:  http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html
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