Category Archives: Tree of Life

The Passing of the Tree of Life Web Project

Posted on 2 November 2025 by David Maddison

The Tree of Life Web Project began its journey almost 40 years ago, and was formally announced in early 1996. It has served thousands of pages of information about the evolutionary tree of life and the characteristics of organisms that … Continue reading →

Posted in Phylogenetics, Tree of Life | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A LUCA in our Courtyard

Posted on 18 February 2025 by David Maddison

One of my recent academic journeys led me down an unexpected path, to a celebration of art and science in the building I work in. I was fortunate to follow this path with others, including the artist who created the … Continue reading →

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The Tree of Life Web Project: 25 years online

Posted on 16 November 2019 by David Maddison

On 16 November 1994, we first made public the prototype version of the Tree of Life Web Project. At that time, it was a series of static web pages, with trees made out of text characters, created by a special … Continue reading →

Posted in Tree of Life | 4 Comments

Zephyr 2.0 and Mesquite 3.3 released

Posted on 13 September 2017 by David Maddison

Yesterday, after about three years in gestation, we released Zephyr 2.0.  Zephyr is a Mesquite package that manages interactions with phylogeny inference packages including RAxML, GARLI, PAUP, and TNT. The most notable additions to Zephyr 2 include implementation of the … Continue reading →

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Happiness is a Big Tree on the Wall

Posted on 4 December 2016 by David Maddison

  In the hallway outside my lab, about 800 species of Bembidiina, together in one tree.  🙂

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Infer all the branches!!!!!

Posted on 3 April 2015 by David Maddison

I’ve already sent this image out into the Twitterverse, but I thought I should record the thought here as well.  Sometimes us phylogeneticists are rather obsessed about having a complete phylogeny. In one moment when I was dreaming of having all Bembidion … Continue reading →

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Dreaming of Saint Helena

Posted on 7 December 2013 by David Maddison

Saint Helena is a small island in the Atlantic Ocean that is a very long way from any continent. It is approximately 1850 km from Africa, and about 3290 km from South America.  It is only 16 km by 8 … Continue reading →

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My favorite phylogeny

Posted on 22 November 2013 by David Maddison

In a previous post, I showed my second-favorite phylogeny. Well, here’s my favorite one, posted on the wall outside my lab. Not that you can really see any details in this picture, but you get the idea:  it’s big.  It … Continue reading →

Posted in fun stuff, Tree of Life | 2 Comments

Changing of the guard

Posted on 16 April 2013 by David Maddison

In 1985, my brother Wayne wrote the first version of MacClade, a graphical program for studying branches of a phylogeny (“clades”) and phylogenies more generally.  It was a very small program, that did just a few things, but was notable … Continue reading →

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