Scientists have unveiled a new ‘Tree of Life’ showing the diversity of life on earth through the evolution of living things and their interrelationships. The new tree was created using genetic data collected in recent years. The researchers found a group of bacteria that are so diverse genetically that they represent half of all the diversity of bacteria on the planet. PRI reports: Humans tend to think of themselves as a pretty important branch on that tree. Certainly we think of animals and plants as being the most dominant and abundant forms of life. But a new model proposed for this map shows animals, plants, fungi, algae — just about every living thing we can see — make up an even tinier portion of Earth’s biodiversity than scientists previously thought. University of Waterloo microbiologist Laura Hug and collaborators in the US and Japan built their new tree of life with genetic data from public databases and more than 1,000 newly reconstructed genomes. Their model, published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology, allowed them to include primitive but widely divergent single-celled organisms that haven’t been grown or cultivated in labs before. “What that’s letting us do is look at a much [...]