Tree of Life This is a page constructed by David and Wayne Maddison of the University of Arizona, the developers of the MacClade software. The Tree of Life is a system designed to contain information about the phylogenetic relationships of organisms, to link biological information available on the Internet in the form of a phylogenetic navigator, and to be an illustration of the unity and diversity of living organisms.

Introduction to Phylogeny This site is part of UC Berkeley's online exhibit about paleontology. You can learn about the history of life on Earth by tracing life's phylogeny from three different starting points: "The Biosphere" (work your way through the phylogeny of all organisms, "The Metazoa" (to examine the history of living and fossil animals over 650 million years), and "Vertebrates." To look up a specific taxon, or to see what's available, click on the "Web Lift" to any taxon, geologic period or topic.

On-line Insect Database This collection of information about insect diversity is housed at the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at the University of Delaware. The site includes an online, graphically-based key to the insects, information on orders of insects (e.g., Orthoptera: grasshoppers, crickets, katydids ), and images of various species (e.g., katydids).

Homepage for Arachnology This is a collection of information on Web sites relating to arachnid (spiders and relatives) biology. Resources include links to online guides (e.g., jumping spiders of America north of Mexico).

Zoological Information by Animal Group This is a nice site maintained as part of The Zoological Record, "an index to worldwide zoological literature, published jointly by BIOSIS and The Zoological Society of London." Information on the Web relating to animals is arranged taxonomically (e.g., fish). Also available here is a glossory of terms commonly occurring in the zoological taxonomic literature.

The Marine Biology Lab (Woods Hole) From the main page: "The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) was established in 1888 as a non- profit institution devoted to research and education in basic biology. Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell, has called the MBL "the uniquely national center for biology in this country." Scientists and students throughout the world come to the MBL to conduct research, teach, study, and collaborate with other scientists." Particularly interesting is the Species Index which is a nifty directory of taxonomically arranged information about marine animals that occur at Woods Hole. For each entry (e.g., Sand Dollar, Echinarachnius parma) a variety of information is provided including a bibliography, an image collection and links to GenBank, a genetic sequence database at NIH that includes all known DNA sequences from an organism.

Life Over Time This is an online exhibit of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Here you can take a multimedia tour of a small part of the current "Life Over Time" exhibit, emphasizing dinosaurs. OK, this one's mainly for fun, but you can work in phylogenetics somehow.

Animal Diversity Web The Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan provides this site: "The Animal Diversity Web is a collection of pictures and information about animals. Accounts of individual species include information on distributions, natural history, conservation, and economic importance, along with pictures and sounds if available. Synopses of some higher taxonomic groups are also provided. The information is arranged in a taxonomic hierarchy for ease of navigation, and "shortcuts" (either through searching for specific names or characteristics or through direct links to some taxa) make it simple to find particular species or groups of species."

The Cephalopod Page This site from Dalhousie University has quite a bit of information about the organisms comprising the phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda (e.g., nautili, squids, cuttlefish and octopuses). Information and images are arranged taxonimcally.

The Kingdom Fungi Dr. Thomas Volk of the Department of Biology and Microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse has put together this fine introduction to the fungi. The material is presented as a slide show that introduces the five kingdom classification system, general characteristics of fungi, morphology and structure of fungi, and different groups within the kingdom. The author also maintains an image library of mycological images arranged taxonomically and which also has a search engine for quickly finding your favorite fungus (e.g., try Boletus).

Birds & DNA This is a short introduction about how DNA evidence can be used to discern the true evolutionary relationships among a group of organisms (here birds) and how reconstructions of these evolutionary relationships can differ depending on the type of data used (i.e., morphological vs. DNA evidence). This is provided as a preview of a product being produced for commericial distribution.

Mammal Species of the World The National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, runs this site which is a clearinghouse for basic information on Earth's mammal species. The database contains 4,629 currently recognized species of mammals in a taxonomic hierarchy that includes Order, Family, Subfamily, and Genus. You can search by scientific name (e.g., Thylacinus cynocephalus) or common name (e.g., Tasmanian wolf). The basic information that is returned includes distribution, type locality, status (i.e., extinct, threatened, endangered, etc.) and miscellaneous comments. From any record at any point in the database you can easily move upwards or downwards in the taxonomic hierarchy (e.g., from species up to genus, from family down to genus).

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