Researchers from multiple institutions have come together to publish Earth's most complete family tree to date, illustrating the evolutionary relationships between about 2.3 million named species of lifeforms over the course of roughly 3.5 billion years on the planet.
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While exhaustive, scientists still have a long way to go. That's because it's believed there are currently about 8.7 million species on the planet today and countless others from Earth's past that are yet to be catalogued.In an effort to expand the tree even further over time, the researchers, who collaborated from 11 institutions, have put their work online at Open Tree of Life -- a massive and open-access digital depository where anyone can download, view and edit the tree -- a kind of "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees.
It's an impressive feat to accomplish in 25 years, considering it took 90 years to complete the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, another large cataloguing project. The graphic is worth looking at, too.
(Score: 2) by miljo on Thursday September 24 2015, @07:29PM
I wish you weren't an AC, AC. I would give you points for this.
One should strive to achieve, not sit in bitter regret.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @07:38PM
It's ok to show us ACs love.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @07:44AM
Moderation is not for the comment author. Moderation is for the readers. You moderate the post so that the readers more easily find the good ones, and can more easily ignore the bad ones. Moderating up is actually more important for AC posts because they start at a lower score, so it needs more upmods until users with a high threshold can see a good AC post.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday September 27 2015, @12:36AM
True and not only that: it is often far more important to mod up good than to mod down bad.
With the exception of spam (which carries a penalty for moderation abuse) modding an AC down is almost always a waste of mod points just like modding down new (Score: 1) or established (Score: 2) users is also almost always a waste and particularly if it's only because something is perceived as offensive (no matter what it is).
When something irks someone the correct thing to do is to either ignore it (people are allowed to have their own opinions, they usually have a reason even when one disagrees) or reply/debate/explain the wrongness.
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