The College of New Jersey Logo

Apply     Visit     Give     |     Alumni     Parents     Offices     TCNJ Today

Interactive Tree

Welcome to the interactive Tasting the Tree of Life. The Tree below represents all 149 ingredients used in preparing the meals for Tasting the Tree of Life. Humans have been added to the tree to help visualize our relatedness to other organisms.

To the right of the tree, major lineages of life have been identified by brackets. Within the tree, many nodes have been marked with a circle and a label indicating the name of the group. Every node represents a lineage splitting event – when two lineages (represented by two branches) split apart giving rise to two independently evolving groups of organisms. Through repeated lineage splitting events from the common ancestor at a node we can observe the evolution of the millions of species of life we recognize today. Hover over the circles placed at nodes in the animal and bacterial groups to learn more about common ancestry and the features that unite each of these groups.

To learn more about trees, have a look at About the Tree of Life.

[google_map map_id="466" height="400px" width="100%"/]