MorphobankScientists around the world, including taxonomic experts working on everything from insects to viruses and dinosaurs to plants, work every day to add to our knowledge of biodiversity through scholarly research in peer-reviewed publications. MorphoBank, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, provides a digital archive of those data so that the observations can be shared in both words and pictures with future scientists and the public.
In particular, MorphoBank assists scientists building the Tree of Life - the genealogy of all living and extinct species. In this endeavor scientists must collect data on all heritable features - both genotypes (e.g., DNA sequences) and phenotypes (e.g., anatomy, behavior, physiology). The genomic part of this work is archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. MorphoBank is part of the new and growing cyberinfrastructure for phenotypes to house, save and share information on anatomy, physiology, behavior and other features of species.