• What is Morphobank?
• MorphoBank in the News
• Recent Projects

• Getting Started
• Sponsors
• Further information

 

Recent Projects

View all published projects

New project published

2008. Simmons, Nancy B., Kevin L. Seymour, Jörg Habersetzer and Gregg F. Gunnell. Primitive Early Eocene bat from Wyoming and the evolution of flight and echolocation Nature 451, 818-821 (14 February 2008).
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New project published

2007. Cardenas, P., J. Xavier, O. S. Tendal, C. Schander and H. T. Rapp. Redescription and resurrection of Pachymatisma normani (Demospongiae: Geodiidae), with remarks on the genus Pachymatisma. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 87(6):1511-1525.
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View recent projects on Amniotes, Sea Cucumbers or cyphophthalmids

What is MorphoBank?

MorphoBank's most important innovation is that it is a web application for conducting phylogenetics or cladistics research on morphology. It enables teams of scientists who use anatomy to study the Tree of Life (phylogeny) to work over the web - in real time - and to do research they could not easily do using desktop programs alone. MorphoBank displays - over the web - dynamic phylogenetic matrices of morphological characters with labeled images demonstrating homology statements, and implements the data editing functions of widely used desktop programs (e.g., Mesquite, Nexus Data Editor) over the web in a password protected environment. It is an environment for virtual collaboration by teams of researchers building phylogenetic matrices with affiliated image data. MorphoBank can also draw on images in existing 2D and 3D digital libraries.

If a scientist has images that are not deposited in other digital libraries, MorphoBank uses its database to store images (including films and CT scans) submitted by scientists, and allows contributors to label anatomical structures on the images. MorphoBank records information on the author of the submission, related publications, critical commentary and species names.

Current development of MorphoBank is supported by the National Science Foundation, Division of Environmental Sciences.

Information on MorphoBank is not to be used for commercial purposes. You can read more about MorphoBank here.

Getting Started

To obtain an MorphoBank login use our registration page.

The MorphoBank Users Guide is now available. The Guide provides an overview of the MorphoBank system and detailed explanations of various tools and work strategies. The guide is available in PDF format suitable for on-screen viewing or printing. Please note: this is an in-progress document that will change as new features come on-line. Please check back occasionally for updated versions of the manual.

There is also a helpful FAQ list available. You can also e-mail technical support at support@morphobank.org.

MorphoBank in the News

MorphoBank is dicussed in issue (Vol. 21, Issue 12, 2006) of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, click here to read The supermatrix approach to systematics by Alan de Queiroz and John Gatesy.

Other articles

Sponsors

This website was prepared by the MorphoBank project, in part, under an award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, finding, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the Department of Commerce.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MorphoBank is very grateful to several organizations and institutions for sponsoring this software development:

Further Information

You can read articles and papers regarding MorphoBank in the More on MorphoBank section. The project's history and the list of active projects using MorphoBank are also available. You can get answers to the most commonly asked questions about MorphoBank in our FAQ section or download the MorphoBank Users Manual and Quick Start guide in our Documentation and Tutorial section.