Darwin's Tree of Life

Click image for a slightly larger view in its own window.

I found a really interesting animation that demonstrates evolution of "Darwin's Finches" (Flash required, 515kb).

This animation is interactive, and is based on the only figure (above) that appeared in the first edition of Darwin's groundbreaking book, On The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. This diagram, a family tree or phylogeny, was printed on an oversized page that had to be folded out of the book to be seen, which was a difficult and expensive task for the printers of the day. This diagram appeared as some of the material in Chapter IV, The Divergence of Character, and inspired five pages of text that explained how to read it.