alt Hacker NewsVery cool. Perhaps you've seen OneZoom[0] already which is purely based on phylogenetic data sourced from Open Tree of Life. OTOL has been around for a long time. The project aggregates phylogenetic data from thousands of studies and creates a massive synthetic tree.[1] It's neat because anyone can contribute. If you find a study not represented in there you can contribute the newick tree/annotation for it.
[1] https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/argus/ottol@378964/...
OneZoom is a great museum piece. Very engaging visualization that invites large touchscreen interaction. Impressive code behind it too for pruning offscreen vectors so the zoom stays smooth. On desktop however, perhaps due to my age, it gives me a bit of gorilla arm.
Thanks to open data, I offer the same node hierarchy of OTT, among 10 other backbones, but present it with 3 different (perhaps less dazzling) viewing mechanics switchable at the top: Icicle, which packs hierarchy into a fixed vertical height while allowing depth to stay horizontally reachable. Chronogram is the opposite, showing structure even 10 levels deep in a compact horizontal region, but at the expense of large vertical expansion. And Tree, the default, which is a compromise that can also show multiple winding paths simultaneously by folding them against the gutter.
I also focus less on the tree itself and more on trait overlay and rolling up thousands or even millions of species into compact segments so you can get a feel for how many chordates lay eggs or how many spiders are carnivorous at a glance. https://ptree.org/#OTT