March 1, 2014

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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.

By Glendon Mellow

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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.

____________

Find out more about PhyloPic:

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

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