r/biology • u/Sparrow-Ceiling • 1d ago

question Everything Cladogram

Is there a cladogram with everything on it? I want to see everything.

5 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

11

u/llamawithguns 1d ago

https://www.onezoom.org/

It tends to be a bit out of date due to the rate at which taxonomy changes, but its fun to play around with

4

u/Electronic-Alarm6370 1d ago

In terms of a "tree of life" that contains every known extant species, unfortunately its not exactly feasible for a few reasons:

Firstly there is just an incredible amount of diversity on the planet, for example just the class of insects contains millions of species, and this isn't even mentioning undocumented species.

Secondly, classifying species on a taxonomical hierarchy isn't as simple as 2 things look similar go next to each other, and can actually be a difficult process of finding a unique trait shared by only 2 species known as a synapomorphy, and these are often highly disputed, making it difficult to have a 'complete' cladogram without it being full of errors.

Third, typically scientists will tend to specialise towards different organisms as there is simply too much information for 1 person to try and comprehend life on the planet, hence creating an accurate tree of life would create considerable coordination between a lot of people, and as mentioned in the second point, there would be considerable discourse around this.

Having said that, there have been attempts to construct a good representation, for example opentreeoflife.org , however this is not an easy website to navigate without knowing the scientific nomenclature for like everything that lives!

3

u/The-Real-Radar 1d ago

Bro wants one that starts at the big bang and ends at this reddit post

4

u/Canis-lupus-uy 1d ago

Lifemap is the most similar thing to what you are asking that I know. i don't know if I would call it strictly a cladogram because it doesn't always follows cladistic rules, but it's the most complete tree of life i know about.