Winter for the Tree of Life…

Sadly, the time has come to suspend the Tree of Life blog. As noted last week, the end of 2009 brings to an end a year of Darwin200 celebrations and our blog along with it.

We’ve had the pleasure of launching some wonderful projects in that time. It all kicked off in February with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. This saw the airing of that wonderful BBC documentary (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) ‘Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life’ presented by Sir David Attenborough (if by any chance you have been living in a cave, click here to see the animation at the heart of it).

The documentary attracted some six and a half million viewers and the animation has been viewed over 150,000 times on YouTube. It has also been featured at museums and events around the world, including the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Boston Museum of Science, London Zoo, the Natural History Museum in London, the Darwin Evolution and the Movies festival in London, as well as educational establishments in India and South Africa.

‘Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life’ also won Best Science Documentary at the 2009 Gierson British Documentary Awards and the animation was nominated for Best Graphic Design - Programme Content Sequences at the 2009 Royal Television Society Craft and Design Awards.

But the end of Darwin year does not mean an end to our Darwin activities! 2010 will see some exciting new projects come to fruition.

The Wellcome Trust will be launching a competition to win a trip to the Galapagos islands, allowing a lucky winner to follow in the footsteps of Darwin himself. Further details on this are coming soon so keep an eye on the Trust’s website or follow @wellcometrust on Twitter.

And if you haven’t had enough of the Tree of Life by now (and who hasn’t?), you’ll soon be able to experience it from the inside. The animation is being adapted into an interactive ‘augmented reality’ attraction, the ‘iFilm’, coming soon to the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre from early 2010.

The Tree of Life animation/interactive itself is, of course, still available to download and remix from this very website. Do contact us at darwin200@wellcome.ac.uk if you would like to use it in any other way.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the blog. As Darwin himself once said:

"doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue"

I hope we’ve achieved that at least a bit. Until the next Darwin anniversary…..

New content added to the Tree of Life website

The Tree of Life blog has a new home! It is now integrated within the new look Tree of Life website.

In fact, the whole Tree of Life website is growing, with exciting new resources to help you get more out of the video animation and the accompanying interactive.

- The updated interactive now incorporates more living things and , now includes many plants, such the orchid, fly agaric and oak tree.

- For teachers and students, we have commissioned a series of curriculum matched lesson plans and worksheets for three key age groups: 11-14, 14-16 and 16-19.

- For scientists interested in evolution and phylogeny, there are links to the latest research on the topics.

- If you're interested in creating your own tree by editing the XML files, find out more by visiting the scientific resources section of the site.

- In addition to the XML files, we’ve made all the files from which the tree is built – including image, video and files – freely and easily available to edit and use under the terms of our Creative Commons licence.

And of course, the Tree of Life blog will continue to keep you up-to-date with the latest news and comment on Darwin and evolution.

You can access all this and more at the Tree of Life website.

The Darwin Correspondence Project

Darwin, like all men of science at the time, wrote a lot of letters, formulating numerous ideas through correspondence with his scientific peers. The good news for Darwin fans is that all those letters are being made available on the web through an ambitious project.

The Darwin Correspondence Project, run by the Cambridge University Library and part-funded by the Wellcome Trust, aims to annotate and transcribe Darwin’s letters, making them freely available online. Its scope and aims are examined by Penny Bailey in a feature article for the Wellcome Trust website.

The Project features letters during his writing of 'On the Origin of Species', as well as correspondence from his time on the HMS Beagle. As well as Darwin's own writings, the Project team have also taken the time to locate, scan and annotate letters written to Darwin by other scientists and academics.

As Professor Jim Second, who leads the project from the Cambridge University Library, says, "Darwin depended on a much wider network of correspondence - including professional scientists, schoolteachers, colonial settlers, plant and animal breeders, missionaries and even clerics - to formulate his ideas. Science is a dialogue, and the letters show it in action."

The letters give insight into the history of evolutionary theory, and indeed science, at the time, as well as demonstrating just how good Darwin was at cajoling interest and support from others.

So far, the Project has located around 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin and his correspondents. Visitors to the Project website can currently read the full texts of over 5000 letters and find information on the remainder using a searchable calendar and database. There are also extensive supporting materials for teachers and researchers, notably on ecological science and the relations between science and religious belief.

Image: Letter from Charles Darwin to Dr.George E.Shuttleworth, Medical Superintendent, Royal Albert Ayslum, Lancaster concerning the children of first cousins. Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Darwin 200 Photography Competition

Unfortunately not an opportunity to submit your finest beards for review, but a proper photography competition on 'Exploring and Investigating Nature'.

The judges are looking for photographs inspired by this theme. It’s a pretty wide remit, encompassing photos from far off countries to your own back garden, animals, plants, the local park, or museum. Some examples can be seen here.

Launched by The Horniman Museum, the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, the Institute of Biology, and the Wellcome Trust, the competition hopes to inspire the same spirit of curiosity that motivated Darwin throughout his life.

Charles Darwin's career was founded on his childhood fascination with the plants and animals on his own doorstep. This fascination took him around the world and led to an understanding of life that has shaped the modern world.

The winners from each category and a 'Best in Show' will be exhibited at the Horniman Museum in London. Deadline for entries is 11 October 2009 and more details can be found at the competition’s webpage.