Hat Tip: Evolutionistrue
There is this supercool new divergence time calculator available at Time Tree. Type in the name of any two species and if there is data it will provide you the divergence time. For those of you true tech/biology nerds, there's an iphone app. It did make me wonder if there are any scientists left who still used graph paper, rulers, pencils and the old fashioned calculators...
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3 comments:
This is an interesting website but it produced some strange numbers. When I entered "ape" and "man" it came up with a divergence time of 1407.8 million years ago. A "rat" and a "mouse" are assigned a divergence time of 36.8 million years.
@Edward
"An ape is any member of the biological superfamily Hominoidea (hominoids). There are two families of hominoids:
* Hylobatidae consists of four genera and sixteen species of gibbon, including the lar gibbon and the siamang, collectively known as the lesser apes.
* Hominidae consists of chimpanzees, gorillas, humans and orangutans[1][2] collectively known as the great apes."
You need to use the latin names because this is more specific, for example - homo sapiens and Hylobates lar = 21.2
O.K.--the problem does seems to be with the name. The program attempts to find the Latin name for these animals and I think it had trouble with the "ape" assignment, for which it used "Alocasia macrorrhizos". The website states: "No result found in the Taxonomy database for complete name".
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