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PhyloPic: 500 Million Years, 44 Artists

  Sometimes you just have to love the internet. Specifically, I love when collaboration results in something wonderful and educational.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


The design for the Phylopic.org tee: "500 million years. 44 silhouettes. 10 artists. 1 shirt." {link url="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"}Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License{/link}

 

Sometimes you just have to love the internet.


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Specifically, I love when collaboration results in something wonderful and educational. PhyloPic is a site where you can find free Public Domain/Creative Commons silhouettes of organisms. They're submitted by artists volunteering their time and talent for educators and well, anybody to use. And now there's a t-shirt you can buy to help support PhyloPic.

From Mike Keesey, creator of PhyloPic:

I am offering a T-shirt showing the evolution of humans from the earliest bilaterian animals ("worms"). This design, using silhouettes from PhyloPic, depicts the origins of vertebrates, tetrapods, mammals, primates, and finally us: Homo sapiens sapiens.

If just 100 of you buy a T-shirt, you will collectively fund PhyloPic's web hosting costs for two years. You will be supporting students, teachers, and researchers — that's something to be proud of. (Or, just do it because it's a pretty cool T-shirt.)

This image features artwork from the following illustrators:

Free to use silhouettes of organisms, over 1,700 so far. Amazing.

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Find out more about PhyloPic:

Edit: corrected the title and added the link correct Creative Commons Licence.