Chondrichthyan Tree of Life

March 9, 2017 5:57 AM

The Chondrichthyan Tree of Life is an incredibly detailed and lovely-to-navigate phylogenic tree of sharks and rays. Click on one to drill down to families, genera, and species.
posted by tchemgrrl (9 comments total)

Oh, wow! You easily could lose a week (or two) to this. Thanks.
posted by brokeaspoke at 6:09 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing. I've been just starting to toy with data organization and web development. This kind of simple, but dense, but legible design is really nice.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:21 AM on March 9, 2017

The Chrome browser on my Android phone helpfully says 'This page is in Latin do you want to translate it'.
posted by jamespake at 6:31 AM on March 9, 2017 [4 favorites]

The species at the top of the list are interesting enough in themselves: all those chimaeras, ghost sharks & spookfish (which aren’t, I gather, to be confused with true spookfish, which are scarcely any less interesting, having ‘the world’s strangest eyes’ and including this fine fellow with a see-through head)… And then, gradually drifting back on & then off-topic again, I looked up the Pacific Spookfish (Rhinochimaera pacifica) which led me to its appearance at #15 in Deep Sea News’ fascinating list of the 27 Best Deep Sea Species (which also includes, I was amused to see, at #26, Chaetopterus pugaporcinus aka the ‘Pig-Butt Worm’)…
posted by misteraitch at 7:11 AM on March 9, 2017 [5 favorites]

The Chrome browser on my Android phone helpfully says 'This page is in Latin do you want to translate it'.

It's not wrong..
posted by Horkus at 7:11 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Latin translation seems unchanged, or it's changed all the Latin names to their English equivalents which happen to be their Latin names.
posted by jamespake at 7:43 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is really neat; I love that whole radial-expansion navigation. Thanks for posting!
posted by cortex at 7:53 AM on March 9, 2017

Oooh! Also take a look at this: OneZoom, a phylogenic tree of ... pretty much almost near everything we know about. It's laid out like a fractal, zoomable, and each leaf and axis on the tree are linkable. Most leaves are clickable, to a pop-up of the wikipedia page, for quick answer-getting.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:28 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is really cool!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 2:47 PM on March 9, 2017