Cladogram advice!

November 12, 2012 10:32 AM

I am looking for a gigantic cladogram, ideally one that encompasses the entire animal kingdom down to the order or family level.

I'm preparing a talk about decapods for an audience of amateur ichthyologists, and would like to put up a big slide of 'Animalia' that I can pan-and-scan while visiting different genera.

The internet is full of structured taxonomy data (e.g. tolweb or wikispecies) so surely some smartass has generated an enormous multi-gig jpeg that draws out entire phyla or kingdoms in painstaking detail.

Does anyone know where I can find that giant cladogram? Failing that, can anyone offer advice about data sets and tools I could use to generate my own custom diagram? And, tangentially: what are your favorite methods for visualizing this kind of thing?

posted by eraserbones to science & nature (3 answers total)

There's this one, which includes 3000 species.
posted by chazlarson at 10:55 AM on November 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

That is very close to what I am looking for! I wish the subdivisions were labeled, but maybe I can do that myself for the ones that I care about.
posted by eraserbones at 11:51 AM on November 12, 2012

To be honest, you might be better off using tolweb.org on the web to highlight all the details you want, in an interactive way. I've seen folks do this before (they just set the webpage up first then interrupt their powerpoint to go to the web). Otherwise, in your position, I'd take screenshots of tolweb pages and put them in the powerpoint sequentially.
posted by Alice Russel-Wallace at 5:33 PM on November 12, 2012