Google Earth phylogenies

Now, for something completely different. I've been playing with Google Earth as a phylogeny viewer, inspired by Bill Piel's efforts, the cool avian flu visualisation Janies et al. published in Systematic Biology (doi:10.1080/10635150701266848), and David Kidd's work.



As an example, I've taken a phylogeny for Banza katydids from Shapiro et al. (doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.04.006), and created a KML file. Unlike Bill's trees, I've drawn the tree as a phylogram, because I think biogeography becomes much easier to interpret when we have a time scale (or at least a proxy, such as sequence divergence).



I've converted COI branch lengths to altitude, and elevated the tree off the ground to accomodate the fact that the tips don't all line up (this isn't an ultrametric tree). I then use the extrude style of icon so we can see where exactly the sequence was obtained from.


Wouldn't it be fun to have a collection of molecular trees for Hawaiian taxa for the same gene, plotted on the same Google Earth map? One could imagine all sorts of cool questions one could ask about the kinds of biogeographic patterns displayed (note that Banza doesn't show a simple west-east progression), and the ages of the patterns.

Generating the KML file is fairly straightforward, and if I get time I may add it to my long neglected TreeView X.