Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The idea of a tree of life arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being).Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
Biogeographic realms are characterized by the evolutionary history of the organisms they contain. They are distinct from biomes, also known as major habitat types, which are divisions of the Earth's surface based on life form, or the adaptation of animals, fungi, micro-organisms and plants to climatic, soil, and other conditions
Earth's western hemisphere showing topography relative to Earth's center instead of to mean sea level, as in common topographic maps Earth has a rounded shape , through hydrostatic equilibrium , [ 85 ] with an average diameter of 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), making it the fifth largest planetary sized and largest terrestrial object of the ...
In biology, taxonomy (from Ancient Greek τάξις 'arrangement' and -νομία 'method') is the scientific study of naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped into taxa (singular: taxon), and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given ...
The BHL digital content is indexed with the names of organisms using taxonomic indexing software developed by the Global Names project. The EOL project was initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who provided US$20 million and US$5 million, respectively.
It is estimated that more than 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, [3] are extinct. [4] [5] Earth is the only celestial body known to harbor life forms. No form of extraterrestrial life has yet been discovered. [6]
A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of the Earth. While this is true of any map, these distortions reach extremes in a world map.