Tree of Life Hunt

I have been searching for the ultimate tree of life (or phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree) to put in our homeschool area for a while now. Well, phylogenetic tree may represent the full diversity of life springing from our universal common ancestor. It may include extinct organisms and unfortunately, it may be very difficult to navigate.

It is not easy. Most mainstream posters are beautiful but not accurate at all – or perhaps they are very dated. After all, they are representing a hypothesis, our best guess on how the organisms are related – and that understanding is changing all the time.

Some posters I came over were somewhat accurate but not pretty to look at. I mean, at all. And even though accuracy is more important to me than graphic design, I do not want my sense of esthetics suffer every morning when I open the door to our homeschool area. I was looking for a unicorn, it seemed.

Berkley University has a wonderful website where they explain how the evolutionary tree is supposed to be read, how they changed over time and what misconceptions people have (or had) about them, like these:

The blue lineage on the leftmost phylogeny does not represent the “main” line of evolution. The equivalent phylogenies shown here emphasize that this same lineage could be shown in different ways depending on how the branches of the phylogeny are rotated.

I finally discovered Evogeneao and fell in love. You can even use their interactive version online and find last common ancestors along with time. We had a lot of fun with that one…

Anyway, cannot wait to hang it up!

Probably along with this one from Berkley University.