PhyloPic - free silhouettes of life forms

PhyloPic was created by me, Mike Keesey, to fulfill one purpose: to provide the world with free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, all available under Creative Commons licenses. Launched in 2011, it has steadily amassed contributions from dozens of artists. Currently it has over 2100 images.


In addition to the illustrations, PhyloPic stores a massive phylogenetic taxonomy of organisms. When searching for a silhouette, if the exact species isn't found, illustrations of close relatives will still appear. This makes PhyloPic an educational resource, since the taxonomy can be browsed and used to generate diagrams of evolutionary lineages.


PhyloPic has proven useful to everyone from casual websurfers to educators to serious researchers. Silhouettes from PhyloPic have shown up in classrooms, scientific papers, and conferences. And, since PhyloPic provides a free programmatic interface, it has been used to augment other projects.


All work on PhyloPic is through volunteers: artists choose to donate their work to the community, and I do the web development and administration. PhyloPic already had a successful Booster campaign last year to fund web hosting, but those funds will run out before the end of next year. As well, I'm not in a good position to do development for free.


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 50 of you buy a T-shirt, you will collectively fund PhyloPic's web hosting costs for an additional year, as well as funding future development for new features. 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.)


Thanks,
—
T. Michael Keesey
Web Developer

P.S. Follow @phylopic on Twitter for updates!