Every living thing on one branching tree, rooted at LUCA — the last universal common ancestor. Click any circle to drill in: that branch grows to fill the screen, its children fan out above it, and where you came from recedes softly below. Keep going all the way down to a single real species — a beetle, an orchid, a shark — each shown with a live photo from Wikipedia.
Getting around. Click a branch to zoom in. Click the background, press Esc or Backspace, scroll outward, or use the breadcrumb at the top to go back up. Press / to search. The little ~320 Ma label on a fork is roughly when that branch split from its parent.
This is an original interactive app inspired by the style of poster "trees of life", not a copy of any one of them. Topology is deliberately simplified — the deep microbial tree is really a tangled web of horizontal gene transfer, not a clean tree, and we say so. Divergence dates blend fossil and molecular-clock estimates and use “~” freely. Photos, galleries and summaries come live from Wikipedia's public API; the app still works offline, just with coloured discs instead of photos. Each photo's author and license are shown with it and listed under Photo credits. Progress is stored only in your browser.
The photos on screen now, from Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Each name opens the photo's page there; each license opens its terms.
Photos whose license cannot be confirmed are not shown.