Cenozoic macroperforate planktonic foraminifera phylogeny of Aze & others (2011). TimeScale Creator Evolutionary Tree. Corrected Version, July 2018. Five datapacks for Java software package.

The Timescale Creator platform is an interactive user environment in which the chart, in our case the evolutionary tree [1, see p. 22–25, 88–92], can be refreshed as options are selected (such as stratigraphic or Earth-history columns) and, given its vector graphics design, unlimited zoom and pop-ups can be employed on the fly. For example the morphospecies and lineage trees of the 2011 study can now be displayed against a time scale comprising not only standard epochs but a comprehensive gamut of Earth-history columns, not just the standard chrono- and bio-stratigraphic units figured in the 2011 paper. And interactively, mouse-over pop-ups allow display of further details of these units (e.g., access to their up-to-date internationally agreed definitions).

At the broadest view, the Timescale Creator versions of the 2011 trees can displayed against a monochrome background or projected against a background coloured by stages, the latter especially useful to keep track of the time interval while zooming in. A cursory look over the original 2011 and Timescale Creator versions of the whole trees reveals some variation in tree shape: for both sets of trees, spacing of clades is specific to each manifestation of a tree, it being determined by graphical programming algorithms dependent on, for example, the length of labels within the tree. A similar artifactual effect on tree shape to note (again, applicable to both sets of trees) is the left- or right-hand positioning (rotation) of descendant clades relative to ancestors.

1. Ogg JG, Gradstein FM, Chunduru NV, Gangi P, Lugowski A, Ault A. Manuals for Timescale Creator use, and for making TSC datapacks. West Lafayette (Indiana): Geologic TimeScale Foundation Inc., 2012 https://engineering.purdue.edu/Stratigraphy/tscreator/download/TSC_Manuals_April2012.pdf.