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Adventures in the Tree of Life

“Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself.”– Kenneth R. Miller, Biologist, Brown University

If you are reading this sentence, you’re presumably a member of the species Homo sapiens, one of somewhere between 5 and 100 million distinct types of organisms living on Earth today. Incredibly, the story of how you are related to all of those species––and millions upon millions more that have gone extinct over the 3.5-billion-year history of life on Earth––can be summarized in an enormous family tree. To help you explore this tree and understand the amazing mechanism behind it, we’ve created the NOVA Evolution Lab.

Play this Lab and you’ll be on your way to becoming an expert in phylogenetics––a fancy name for the study of the evolutionary relationships among species. The information and concepts you learn along the way will provide a strong foundation for pursuing any topic in the life sciences, from astrobiology to zoology. As Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky noted in the title of his 1973 essay, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”