What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life
I'm currently reading Nick Lane's excellent book, The Vital Question, which explores what we know about the split between archaea and eukaryotes, so this was an exciting article. This discovery is still one level below that split, within the eukaryotes, but the ongoing discoveries of more and more ancient branches suggests the tantalising possibility that we may one day find something even more ancient still swimming around somewhere --- a missing link from billions of years ago.<p>What strikes me about both this article and Nick Lane's book is that when I was in school the tree of life was presented as this thing that people had pretty much figured out. Since then it's been altered almost beyond recognition using genomics. I hope there are people still in school who read articles like this one and get inspired to get into this amazing area of research.