Tree Of Life Branches It's Way To 3.5 Billion Years Ago On Earth

After three years of painstaking effort, scientists from 11 institutions have put together a Tree of Life showing how the planet's 2.3 million named species are connected.

The tree shows life since it first began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. It shows how species diverged from others, over time. The tree, being called version 1.0, has been put together from nearly 500 other trees selected from tens of thousands of trees published between 2000 and 2012, Business Standard reports.

"This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. It's by no means finished. It's critically important to share data for already-published and newly-published work if we want to improve the tree," said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University.

Researchers who put the tree together with a $5.76 million grant, said the biggest challenge was accounting for name changes, mistakes and abbreviations for species mentioned in discrete trees, some of which date to 100,000 years ago.

Additionally, researchers also realized during the course of their work that only one in six phylogenetic studies have been published in a digital usable form.

"There's a pretty big gap between the sum of what scientists know about how living things are related, and what's actually available digitally," Cranston said.