The Tree of Life

Click for larger image in its own window.

This picture is a visualisation of the entire tree of life. The tree of life (cellular organisms) has three main branches;

  • The bacteria (unicellular organisms that lack a nucleus) which are in focus in this picture and represented by orange nodes.
  • The archaea are probably more closely related to the eukaryotes than they are to the bacteria even though they lack a cell nucleus and represent some of the most extreme forms of life on earth. They are represented by red nodes and near the top and in the background of the picture.
  • The eukarya (all cellular organisms with a cell nucleus) are represented by yellow nodes and are located on the left hand side and in the background of the picture.

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Another cool, but frequently overlooked, data structure in the tree family is called the B-tree. A B-tree is a search tree, very similar to a BST in concept, but optimized differently.
This post is very delayed, but things have been busy.

Do you have a larger version of this (larger than your flickr version)? I'd love to make it my desktop pic, just to remind me where I am.

Beautiful!

That's excellent!

We are soooooo outnumbered! Is there an image anywhere that is 3D/graphically rotates 3D? Does it look like a spiral of some kind or more like the representations of the galaxies in the universe?

Chardyspal

By Chardyspal (not verified) on 12 Feb 2007 #permalink

Intrigued I went searching.

http://www.ii.uib.no/~tim/frontPages/treesPage.shtml allows you to see an animation of this and another more detailed projection of Eutheria (Placentals) only. For me the animation is slow as I have wideband rather than real broadband, may be better for others.

It also has a larger image, may be suitable for a desktop pic.

It is humbling to see how little of life is on our branch.

By Chris' Wills (not verified) on 12 Feb 2007 #permalink