Biology 284a : Patterns in Life's Diversity -

GENERAL SOURCE PAGES

There are quite a few of these "general windows onto diversity" pages scattered about. Here's a couple which are O.K.

 Diversity of Life Web Index
A pretty good jumping-off point to Diversity resources on the web. First page takes a while to load, especially via modem, but there is a good collection of links available. I have no idea who Wendy is.

Biodiversity & Collections WWW Server
A faster-loading, rather more technical version of that above. A good general source, though not broken up by "5-Kingdoms" as are Wendy's pages

TRITON, the Taxonomy Resource & Index To Organism Names, is a system under development by BIOSIS/Zoological Record as a mechanism for making data related to names of both fossil and recent organisms, and in particular animal nomenclatural data from the Zoological Record (ZR), available on the www.

 The TRITON name index, the Index to Organism Names is offered as an aid to the general bioscience community and gives basic nomenclatural and hierarchy information, plus ZR volume occurrence counts (reflecting use in the literature) for animal names; and links to other organisations' data for non-animal names. It can be used to identify the taxonomic group to which an organism belongs and to link to further information from ZR or other collaborating organisation.

LIFE'S PHYLOGENY and other things.

 These sites concern the relatedness of groups in a phylogeny of all earth's organisms.

1)  Within the set of pages produced by University of California Museum of Paleontology there is one called Paleontology without walls which allows you to look at:

• Phylogeny -- the "family tree" of life.
• Geological Time -- the temporal existence of groups of organisms.
• Evolutionary Thought -- evolutionary topics and scientists in their historical context.

 Or, if you go to the bottom of the P.W.W. page, you will find, among others, a link to their "Web Lift" which allows you to browse the Tree of Life.

2)  Another very good overview of diversity as arrayed on the phylogenetic tree of all life is that provided at the TREE OF LIFE site. This is my favourite diversity site, and in providing the most up-to-date picture of earth's biota and its inter-relationships, it links to over 20 other computers around the globe.

At this site, the home of the Tree, is a number of documents that provide basic information about the project:

• A description of the Tree of Life project.
• Goals of the Tree of Life.
• Questions and answers about the Tree of Life.   This page contains answers to common questions about the project, including how it should be cited.
• Help in using the Tree of Life.   This page contains information about navigating through the Tree of Life, including the function of buttons in the toolbars.
• Glossary of terms used in the Tree of Life.
• An introduction to phylogenetic biology.   This page contains some basic information about the nature of phylogenies, how they are inferred, the current state of our knowledge, and why such knowledge is important.

BIOGEOGRAPHY

I have some very useful materials concerning the explanation of the geographical distribution of organisms here.

Follow both links on this page to get to a) a general look at biogeography and b) some details about specific matters.

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