TimeTree :: The Timescale of Life

TimeTree Search

How It Works

Two species or higher taxa are queried (e.g., cat and dog).

TimeTree compares all taxa in one inclusive group (e.g., Feliformia) with those in the other group (e.g., Caniformia) to find all published times of divergence for the evolutionary split.

Citing TimeTree:

Hedges SB, Marin J, Suleski M, Paymer M & Kumar S (2015) Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification. Mol Biol Evol 32: 835-845
[Download PDF]

Kumar S & Hedges SB (2011) TimeTree2: species divergence times on the iPhone. Bioinformatics 27:2023-2024
[Download PDF]

Hedges SB, Dudley J & Kumar S (2006) TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms. Bioinformatics 22:2971-2972
[Download PDF]

Poster

The TimeTree of Life from an assembly of all individual timetrees from the Time Tree of Life book. Order an offset print or download the file to print your own.

How It Works

How It Works

Two species or higher taxa are queried (e.g., cat and dog).

TimeTree looks for these species in the TTOL to find their most recent common ancestor and produces the time estimate available. All studies with published times of divergence for that evolutionary split are shown in a Table format. When one or both of the species are not present in TTOL, the NCBI taxonomy is scanned to find the closest relatives of the species or higher taxa requested by the user. Then, those taxa are used as proxies and the most recent common ancestor identified to generate the final time estimates.

Poster

The TimeTree of Life from an assembly of all individual timetrees from the Time Tree of Life book. Order an offset print or download the file to print your own.

Downloads

On our Results page, you can download all individual time estimates and study data associated with the query. The iPhone and iPad apps, and all chapters of the Timetree of Life book, can be downloaded by using their respective links. In addition, we will soon make available a facility to download timetrees consisting of multiple species, where users will also be able to input their own species trees. These facilities will be available for a large number of species (>50,000 species) as soon as we complete the processing and synthesis of results from over 2000 studies into this resource. In the meantime, we provide the >50,000-species timetree of life as a download here.