TimeTree: evolutionary iPhone app
This isn't really serious news, but I found it cool even so. Story.
The app, developed by scientists at Penn State University in the USA, includes an image of the "Tree of Life" - a circular image showing the route life has taken from its single source to the 1,610 taxonomic families that exist (containing an estimated total of between seven and 100 million individual species). Users enter the names of any two species or families, and TimeTree will tell you how long ago their common ancestor lived.
So humans and their fellow mammals and, say, flatfish are pinpointed as sharing a common ancestor 495 million years ago. Humans and their fellow Old Word primates split from the New World monkeys at 44.2 million years ago, humans and rest of the apes from monkeys 30.4 million years ago, while humans and chimpanzees went their separate ways a mere eight million years in the past. All of that is dwarfed by the split between archaea and all other life, which happened 3,833.3 million years ago - when the Earth itself was just 700 million years old.
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