Ever wonder how long ago your dog and your ferret shared a common ancestor? Or humans and chimpanzees, our closest animal relative?
Now you can indulge that curiosity with your iPhone.
This month two researchers — Dr. Blair Hedges of Penn State University and Dr. Sudhir Kumar of Arizona State University, who earned his doctorate in State College launched the official version of an iPhone application that allows people to track the evolutionary divergence of different species. It’s based on their TimeTree database, which was already available online.
The app is easy to use, even for those who aren’t scientifically oriented. All one has to do is plug in the names of two organisms; the scientific Latin name is best, but common names like “leafy liverwort” and “shrimp” work too. The app will calculate how long ago the two split and show studies illustrating where that calculation came from.
“It’s more than just a static page of data,” says Hedges, a Penn State biology professor.
For the record, it says humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago.
Gathering all that information took years, Hedges says. Most of it was publicly available, but in the form of graphs and studies that aren’t gathered as simply as a Google search. The point of the project was to make biological research easier by digging up all that information and making it easier to find. Hedges says it’s useful to a variety of researchers, from biologists to astronomers.
“Lots of different scientists want to know when animals split, when species split,” he says.
Now the researchers are developing a mobile-friendly version of the TimeTree website. It should soon be accessible from all types of smartphones.
Source: Dr. Blair Hedges, Penn State
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen
