PhyloPic Is Back!

Last year, I launched a project called PhyloPic. The goal of this project was to create an open database of freely reuseable silhouette images of organisms. Furthermore, it featured a phylogenetic taxonomy so that, if a taxon wasn't illustrated, an approximation could be found.

Pleurosiga minima

This image is in the public domain.

I launched it as a "public alpha", meaning that it wasn't complete and still had some bugs. The year turned out to be very busy for me: an awful thing happened, and a wonderful thing happened. And I didn't really have time to push PhyloPic to the next level.

Unfortunately, I hadn't built it well enough in the first place. The architecture was not optimized, and the site became extremely slow and buggy. I took it offline, hoping to release a new version in short order, but it turned out to need a lot more work than I first thought.

Happily, it is now ready again!

In Anticipation: The Evolution of the Raven, in Silhouettes

Any day now there will be a relaunch of a certain project I launched last year. (Just working through some technical details.) In anticipation of that, here's the evolutionary history of the Common Raven (Corvus corax), illustrated with silhouettes:

click to enlarge

A Proposal to Amend the PhyloCode

The draft PhyloCode has been in a pretty stable form for a while. But recently, there has been a proposal to drastically change how it handles species. You can read the proposal here: 

Proposal for Changes to the PhyloCode, with Respect to Species

The first paragraph:

The overarching goal of this proposal is to remove all mention of "species" from the  PhyloCode. Detailed justifications for this goal are given in a supporting paper (Cellinese, Baum, and Mishler, in review); here we present a summary of the main arguments, along with specific proposals for change.

Before I weigh in on this, I'm curious as to what other people think. Please comment below, or send comments to David Marjanović, the Secretary of the Committee on Phylogenetic Nomenclature.

UPDATE:
If anyone would like a Microsoft Word version of this document, just ask.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
I have weighed in.