Finding The Fly Tree of Life - The Poster!

Fly diversity is unimaginably huge: over 150,000 species in 150+ families that evolved over 240 million years. Hard to picture? Take a look at this poster, FINDING THE FLY TREE OF LIFE, a visual summary of fly diversity and evolution taken from the FLYTREE results published earlier this year. It includes an image of every currently recognized family of flies (depending on your classification), and shows our current "best guess" of how fly families are related, based on analysis of DNA sequences.

This public-friendly poster is part of the outreach component of the FLYTREE project, and is meant to help publicize the project and fly diversity in general. Feel free to print, distribute, or advertise. Thanks to all who gave permission to use their images, especially Tom Murray and others at www.bugguide.net.

Map of the Fly Tree of Life Published!

Hailed as the "new periodic table for flies," the National Science Foundation funded FLYTREE project published its findings in the March 14, 2011 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Wiegmann, B.M., Trautwein, M.D., Winkler, I.S., Barr, N.B., Kim, J.-W., Lambkin, C., Bertone, M.A., Cassel, B.K., Bayless, K.M., Heimberg, A.M., Wheeler, B.M., Peterson, K.J., Pape, T., Sinclair, B.J., Skevington, J.H., Blagoderov, V., Caravas, J., Kutty, S.N., Schmidt-Ott, U., Kampmeier, G.E., Thompson, F.C., Grimaldi, D.A., Beckenbach, A.T., Courtney, G.W., Friedrich, M., Meier, R., and Yeates, D.K. 2011. Episodic radiations in the fly tree of life.

Congratulations!!