Time Tree of Life: Tracing the Beginnings of Species' Lives on Earth
TimeTreeWeb website: http://www.timetree.org/
Penn State Live recently posted this article... it explains the Time Tree of Life a lot better than I can! -- The book will soon be available at Penn State University Libraries.
University
Park, Pa. -- 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
Timetree 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),
which is written by a consortium of 105 experts on specific groups of
organisms and is edited by Hedges and Kumar. 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 extraordinary 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," Hedges said. Many researchers long have studied the times of origin of individual species in order to piece together a Tree of Life, but now the Timetree of Life project provides a synthesis of the time-calibrated Tree of Life, in addition to adding much new information from previously unpublished scientific studies.
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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 reviewed in the book became known only recently, in the hundreds of scientific articles published during the past five or ten years.
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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 timetree showing how the families are related and when they split from their closest relative, and a table with divergence times. Each chapter of the book was subjected to a rigorous scientific review by other experts in the respective field..
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Support for developing TimeTreeWeb has come from the U. S. National Science Foundation, the Astrobiology Institute of the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Science Foundation of Arizona, and the Biodesign Institute of ASU.
Penn State Live recently posted this article... it explains the Time Tree of Life a lot better than I can! -- The book will soon be available at Penn State University Libraries.
New initiative traces the beginning of species' life on Earth
Wednesday, June 10, 2009"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," Hedges said. Many researchers long have studied the times of origin of individual species in order to piece together a Tree of Life, but now the Timetree of Life project provides a synthesis of the time-calibrated Tree of Life, in addition to adding much new information from previously unpublished scientific studies.
.
.
.
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 reviewed in the book became known only recently, in the hundreds of scientific articles published during the past five or ten years.
.
.
.
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 timetree showing how the families are related and when they split from their closest relative, and a table with divergence times. Each chapter of the book was subjected to a rigorous scientific review by other experts in the respective field..
.
.
.
Support for developing TimeTreeWeb has come from the U. S. National Science Foundation, the Astrobiology Institute of the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Science Foundation of Arizona, and the Biodesign Institute of ASU.
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