Tree of Life

This interactive website is designed to engage the public - teachers, scientists, animators, and others - with tools and resources designed to illustrate an idea that Charles Darwin and his contemporaries used to explain the evolutionary links between living things: the tree of life. It was created through a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the BBC, and the Open University. The project was set up to celebrate the work of Darwin and to produce an updated, fully accessible, and scientifically accurate version of the tree of life, created by Shadow Industries, that reflects our deeper understanding of evolution since Darwin's day.

Features include:

• Education resources: Lesson plans, student activities (including scientific games), and other resources are meant to help teachers plan and run lessons that get students excited about evolution and Darwin. They complement the project's Darwin 200 teaching resources.
• Scientific resources: "Create your own personalised version of the Tree of Life. Keep abreast with the latest peer-reviewed scientific publications on phylogeny and evolution with our RSS feed from PubMed."
• Files from the interactive section of the website: The Tree of Life is an open source project, so all the files from which the tree is built - including image, XML, and animation files - are freely available to edit and use, under the terms of the project's Creative Commons licence.