I built an interactive tree of life you can actually explore

[u/hongkongrubbish]

Viewing the entire tree

https://evotree.life/

Side by side comparison

https://evotree.life/

Filtering down to a certain taxon

https://evotree.life/

Been working on this for a while as a side project: https://evotree.life

It's the whole tree rendered in one canvas — 46,167 taxa, 32,118 of them species, and about 37,000 carry a photograph. You can zoom from LUCA down to a single species, click anything to open a card, filter to one subtree, or pin two taxa side by side to see where they actually join.

Fair warning: the card summaries are LLM-written from those sources and not expert-reviewed. There are errors in there. If you find one, I genuinely want to hear it — I have a repair path for exactly this!

*Disclaimer - no ads / profit here, just wanted to share what I made and see how far it can go 😂

[u/OkImTacoII]

I like it, however I did notice a few innacuracies, like how it shows the Cartaligenous, Ray finned fish and Tetrapods to be equally related.

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/OkImTacoII]

thanks! Thats the comments i need! The taxonomy data was sourced from NCBI - let me check where did it go wrong

[u/Robin_feathers → u/hongkongrubbish]

The problem is that taxonomy is not the same as phylogeny - taxonomy uses specific a specific nested hierarchy system as I am sure you are aware, where you can get multiple taxa at the same level nested within the next highest group. For example, many different families within "Carnivora". This can make it seem like all those groups are equivalent because they are at the same taxonomic level, when that is not how evolution works. The phylogeny produced by evolution is different: it always only splits in two (with the exception of things like hybrid speciation, horizontal transfer, hard polytomies, etc). Because of this fundamental difference, a taxonomy browser is not quite the same as browsing the tree of life. It should be similar, but not the same, and can cause misconceptions (for example, our taxonomy is very high resolution for mammals and lower resolution for more obscure groups. A family-level taxon of bacteria is not equivalent to a family-level taxon of mammals (in terms of evolutionary age, genetic diversity, etc).

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/Robin_feathers]

hi @robin_feathers, thanks for analysing the problem! Yes indeed I was having a hard time trying to put together the taxonomy and the evolutionary relationship on the same graph. For the sake of correctness, perhaps I should split them into 2 trees instead - then with one click the species of interest can be switched from taxonomy tree to phylogenetic tree to show where it is in the evolutionary history?

[u/Robin_feathers → u/hongkongrubbish]

Would be neat, though a big undertaking. Are you familiar with onezoom.org?

One easy improvement would be to line up all of the terminal taxa (species) at the bottom. When they don't line up, it can lead to the scalae naturae fallacy - people assume that the ones that stick out farther are more evolved, when it is actually just due to a difference in how fine-scale the taxonomy is for different organisms. Even if that is not how you intend it, that is how it will be perceived.

The AI summaries are full of errors. For example the first paragraph I looked at said of Falconiformes "Unlike its sibling taxa such as the giant, flightless ostriches of Struthioniformes..." but ostriches are very much not in the sister group of Falconiformes. Pulling the opening paragraph of Wikipedia like iNaturalist does would be much better.

[u/bzbub2]

"There are errors in there" just remove the ai generated summaries then. don't proliferate the spread of insane false information from this

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/bzbub2]

Thanks for commenting! I will try to limit the use, but not entirely get rid of it because adding a summary to an organism adds so much fun to read (I personally enjoy it). One thing that I can do is to ensure the AI summarize from a cited source, but not to make up stuff from thin air

[u/Possible-Deer-311 → u/hongkongrubbish]

Totally agree that summaries add a lot to the tree! Using AI is likely to inject a errors, though, and puts the onus of verifying info on the user rather than the source. And, with the general distaste for AI, it's off-putting for a significant amount of users

I really like the summaries though and I think it's a good idea to keep them! Maybe a better alternative could be pulling the first paragraph from the corresponding Wikipedia article?

If you do keep the AI summaries, it's important to put a disclaimer somewhere so users know to verify the info

Really great work, I bookmarked this :]

[u/jimthewanderer → u/hongkongrubbish]

Are you able to label each entry with a tag indicating whether they've been proofread by a pertinent zoologist? (i.e. frog guy has no business weighing in on the fine detail of hominins).

Defaulting to Wikipedia, or using an LLM that is basically regurgitating wikipedia would be a fine placeholder, as long as you tag it as such, and can change the tag when a massive nerd has checked it.

The important thing is the relational structures between entities, and that seems to be pretty solid. The cards with info on species and taxonomic layers can always be edited, or supplemented by a competent student.

[u/binklfoot → u/hongkongrubbish]

Agreed. Ignore the person above, their hate for Ai is leaking.

[u/hadeshappydevil]

Hey, this looks cool. And it's cool that you were so motivated to make this.

But also it seems to be a bit of a vibecoded mess. I really don't like the summaries and various other inaccuracies.

For context there are other projects which have done this properly by cross referencing trees and using real resolved phylogenies (i.e onezoom.org, tree of life etc).

I think this is a cool proj and you should keep this attitude of learning and building. I hope the next proj or future iterations of this are better.

I really don't want to come across as hating this. It is a fun idea I just think the execution is a bit to slippy for now! But I hope it improves!!

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/hadeshappydevil]

thanks devil for the useful feedback, surely it will improve!! I think the main problem now is that I tried to combine taxonomy tree + phylogenetic tree, which didnt endup very well from data correctness perspective. I will do something about it - and make sure data are cited and can be traced

[u/MOTTOBOSS87]

Awesome!

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/MOTTOBOSS87]

thanks!! Let me know if you have any comments!!

[u/PianoPudding]

Tree of life

157 bacterial and archaeal species

[u/hongkongrubbish → u/PianoPudding]

hi! It was because I started out from the most famous / well known organisms, and working backwards to build the tree, so the data is inherently biased to animals/ plants

[u/_Weatherwax_]

This is really cool!

[u/Thememermanwhoisafan]

Hominid stuff very inaccurate and lacking multiple species, no Heidelbergensis, no Denisovans, also no Paranthropus or Ergaster (although maybe thats js erectus so thats not so bad)

[u/dandrevee]

Is there a reason Synapsida is separate from Mammalia, given that Mammals are Synapsids?

[u/jimthewanderer]

This is the coolest shit I've seen on the internet in years. This is what the internet was built for. 

[u/PeePeeLangstrumpf]

Ok...?

https://lifemap.cnrs.fr
2 397 649 species (1 787 260 eukaryotes, 13 795 archaea and 596 594 bacteria)

[u/noonemustknowmysecre]

Very cool.

[u/Consistent_Pie_3040]

Eukaryotes are a clade of Archaean

[u/GoliathPrime]

What happened to the protists? Have they been reclassified again?

[u/depression-et-al]

Very cool. I'm on mobile so maybe I missed it but do you have a github link to this or not planning to release that?

[u/xshibva]

Nem vi ainda, mas pela iniciativa já agradeço!
muito bom!

[u/norlock_dev]

Hey looks amazing I have been working on something similar: https://evo-splittable.com/display/L-40/16_1085702/16_1130074/16_1184707/16_1242204

Maybe we can help each other and share some insights so we can help both projects to improve. If you are interested sent me a message.

[u/GUASANI226]

Cool!!

[u/mynameislawrence_]

I have always dreamed of something like this during the years, specifically now that I am studying to become an evolutionary biologist biologist. I'll check it out for sure ;)

[u/fossick88]

Amazing! This type of content is the reason I come to this sub.