Visualizing the tree of life

What would the tree of life look like? Really really big. Check out this crazy poster by David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell (University of Texas) based on rRNA sequence data that includes about 3,000 species. It is free to download for personal and educational purposes. I like the "you are here" marker.

Other related stuff:

A Phylogeny of Complete Genomes: Data Repository -- a high-resolution picture of a tree based on the analysis of complete genomes (Ciccarelli & al. 2006). And an interactive version. You can even upload your own data! And read the journal article about it.

Timothy Hughes has an interesting page about Phylogenetic tree visualisation along with a visualisation of the NCBI "Tree of Life" in Walrus (a Java based 3D hyperbolic viewer). Craziness.

An interesting powerpoint presentation entitled Visualizing phylogenetic trees, and linking them to databases, by Brent D. Mishler and Rebecca L. Shapley.

And, of course, there is the Tree of Life Project.

Picture: The Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt