Half a Thousand Silhouettes

Last night PhyloPic reached 500 images! Here's the 500th, a Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaicus) by Steven Traver:

Steven submitted 71 silhouettes in the past week! (All vector, too.) I'd like to take a moment to recognize all the people who have submitted silhouettes numbering in the double digits:

• Steven Traver (71)
• The Funk Monk (42)
• Scott Hartman (40)
• Maija Karala (27)
• Matt Martyniuk (16)

(I'm still the only person with triple digits.)

In some completely random news, PhyloPic got tweeted by none other than Pee-Wee Herman. (My only guess is that Paul Reubens [assuming he runs that account] got it from Metafilter, which got it from SV-POW!) There was a huge traffic spike that day, and I'm happy to say the relaunched site did not crash. The first version wasn't even able to handle a hundredth of that traffic.

Today's secret word is "bilaterians".

There's still plenty of work left to do, but lots of progress has been made. Some of the lineages are getting very, very good coverage. I did some work to flesh out Cetacea (taken largely from Chris huh's amazing vector image of nearly all living cetacean species). Here's a collage depicting the evolution of humpback whales (Balaenoptera novaeangliae):

Hmm, I should flesh out that Metazoa-Vertebrata transition some more. Could use some basal bilaterians.

That's the secret word! AGGHHHHH!