FAQs

The synthetic tree does not currently record branch lengths or dates. The tree is constructed by an automated procedure from information found in published phylogenetic trees. These trees rarely have branch lengths or dates. When branch lengths are present, their meaning is not consistent across studies and it is not clear how one would calibrate them when combining trees.

We only have the one tree viewer right now, and it is limited to depth of three for performance reasons.

We only have the one tree viewer right now. The folks behind OneZoom are interested in visualizing our data, and we hope providing the data will perhaps inspire others to build much cooler visualizations than what we have currently on our site. If you want to look at the tree locally, you can download and view it in Dendroscope (which is the only one we know that can handle a tree of this size).

A taxonomy answer.

Another taxonomy question.