Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday Beautiful Science is a depiction of the tree of life, done as a sphere. Previously, I've discussed the limitations of depicting phylogeny on a standard tree, and suggested that doing it as a circle or a sphere would be more useful. Turns out I'm not the only one who thinks that. This is one particular 3-D visualization that I've taken from Tim Hughes at the University of Bergen (he has several others at his site). Yet other 2-dimensional visualizations can bee seen here.