Starting in 2006, several people were experimenting with phylogenetic tree structures visualized in Google Earth, and these experiments were blogged here, here, here and here. Unfortunately, most of these experiments are no longer online, so those articles are now linking to nonexistent pages.

But that doesn’t mean that these kinds of visualizations have stopped filling a need. Most recently, Christian Anderson went looking for a script to build phylogenetic trees in Google Earth, couldn’t find the ones linked to here in Ogle Earth, and so decided to build his own.

He sent over the result, and it is worth posting here for the sake of future web searches. This is a zip file containing the a script written in the R language, as well as a sample KML file. He’s looking for feedback.