My latest tweak to BioNames is to add colour to the phylogenies. Terminal nodes with the same name are labelled with the same background colour. For example, here is a tree for fiddler and ghost crabs: The colours make it easier to see that this tree has a mixture of a few sequences from divergent taxa, and a lot of sequences from the same taxa. Note that you can now also download the SVG drawing of the tree.

One of the things that didn't make last week's deadline for launching BioNames was the inclusion of phylogenies.

It is well known that phylogeny databases such as TreeBASE capture a small fraction of the published phylogenies. This raises the question of how to increase the number of trees that get archived.

Some serious displacement activity. I'm toying with adding phylogenies to iSpecies, probably sourced from the PhyLoTA browser. This raises the issue of how to display trees on a web page. PhyLoTA itself uses bitmap images, such as this one: but I'd like to avoid bitmaps. I toyed with using SVG, but that has it's own series of issues (it basically has to be served as a separate file). So, I've spent a couple of hours playing with the element.