loading 1475 nodes · 1345 images…
Explore life's family tree, from the common ancestor of all life to single species
A radial dendrogram of life on Earth. Pan and zoom from the three domains at the center out to individual species at the rim; every branch is a real divergence drawn from the Open Tree of Life. Stage 1 ships a curated tree of roughly 500 hand-picked species — every kingdom and major phylum represented, each leaf paired with a CC-licensed photograph where one exists.
Four interactions: zoom and pan, type-ahead species search, a most-recent-common-ancestor finder that highlights the path between any two species, and a geological-time slider that grows the tree from 4.5 Gya forward. Later stages widen the data layer to the full Open Tree of Life synthesis and backfill missing imagery with stylized illustrations generated on rented GPU.