Saturday, April 30, 2016

OneZoom: The tree of life in a massive interactive visualization

OneZoom is a recently launched a large-scale node visualization of the tree of life based on these previous efforts. I saw it announced in Jerry Coyne's blog about evolution and I immediately began playing with it.

Even if the project is still incomplete, it already shows a vast amount of information. Just open it up and start zooming and zooming, or go back to the beginning and click on one of the species. Or follow this link to zoom in the tree and reach the modern lion. You can also search for any species you want.

The following passage comes from the official description of the project:

“The OneZoom software allows you to explore the tree of life in a completely new way: it's like a map, everything is on one page, all you have to do is zoom in and out. We hope you have fun exploring the OneZoom tree of life - we've certainly had fun developing it. Even after thousands of hours working on it, we are still frequently astonished at what it reveals about the world around us. The OneZoom software uses fractals to condense the entire tree of life into a single, zoomable page. OneZoom is so named because all the information is on a single page: all you have to do is zoom to reveal details.”