A single map of all life, grown from the bottom up. Time runs from the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago at the roots to the living canopy of today at the top. Scroll up to watch evolution unfold; scroll down to travel back toward the Last Universal Common Ancestor.
Branch width is biodiversity — the whole tree swells from a single microbial thread into a vast crown, and the Big Five mass extinctions cut visible notches across every branch. Widths and diversity curves are editorial and illustrative, like the original Histomap's stream widths — a curated poster, not a research phylogeny. Deep microbial evolution is genuinely a tangled web (rampant horizontal gene transfer), not a clean tree; we simplify it into tidy clades and say so.
The time scale is deliberately warped: life was single-celled for its first ~3 billion years, so the microbial deep past is compressed and the Phanerozoic (the last 541 million years) is expanded. Toggle ⇅ for a more linear scale to feel just how long microbes ruled alone.
Controls — Scroll to travel through time. Ctrl/⌘+scroll or pinch to zoom (zooming reveals sub-branches). Click any branch, fossil, or event to read its story. Click a branch's Trace ancestry to light the unbroken path down to LUCA; shift-click a second branch to find their common ancestor. Drag the timeline edge to jump; click it for "life at this moment." Press / to search.
Blurbs are hand-written for this project. Images and "read more" links come live from Wikipedia's public API; the map works offline without them. Dates blend fossil and molecular-clock estimates and use "~" freely. Progress is stored only in your browser.