I enjoyed drawing my family tree when I was young, but have long since run out of space to fit in all my ancestors, so I was quite impressed to see people have found a solution to fitting 2 million species onto a family tree of "all" life. I'm having a bit of trouble with the claims that it is complete and covering all of life though, as the estimates I recall for species numbers of eukaryotes are on the order of 8 million, and for all cellular life there was a calculation predicting one trillion species. So, it's rather a family tree of every species that has a binomial name, but still quite impressive.
I took that as an excuse to discuss the cultural history of using trees for data visualisation as well. The resulting feature is out now:
A family tree of everything alive
Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 2, 24 January 2022, Pages R55-R58
FREE access to full text and PDF download
Following the evolution of our ancestry from the last universal ancestor, one has to watch out for the places where we take a small side road, while the road ahead leads to a larger number of species. This is the case first for the split between deuterostomes and protostomes and then, shown here, when mammals part ways with the rest of four-legged animals. (Image provided by OneZoom.)
PS The PNAS special issue on the Earth BioGenome project, which aims to sequence the genomes of all named eukaryotes, so a very similar number of species (1.8 million) unfortunately arrived too late to be mentioned in this feature. I covered that project on its launch in 2018, and will do an update on it elsewhere.
NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.
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