Finnish paleontology student Mikko Haaramo began Mikko's Phylogeny Archive (http://www.helsinki.fi/~mhaaramo/) as a private project to collect phylogeny trees for different groups of organisms. The project's original name was "Life As We Know It."
When first published online in 1997, Mikko's Phylogeny Archive was hosted on the Finnish Museum of Natural History (FMNH) web server, although with no incoming links, it was essentially an internal project. Later, during correspondence with another person about the phylogeny of early birds, Haaramo shared his archive's web address, making the project public.
Mikko's Phylogeny Archive has grown slowly, since it
is the project of a single individual. Nevertheless, Haaramo has continued to add to it over the past decade. He moved all the files from the FMNH server to the University of Helsinki's web server in early 2008 in order to facilitate updating the web version. Neither the FMNH nor the University of Helsinki is formally associated with the project.
Mikko's Phylogeny Archive is not itself peer-reviewed; it is a hobbyist project collecting information from many sources. Haaramo is adamant on the fact that it may contain bias, errors, and speculation. Even so, as a good faith project providing references for individual phylogeny trees and linking to other respected phylogeny sites, Mikko's Phylogeny Archive has a good reputation, with a number of incoming links from Internet reference databases.
The first portion of Mikko's Phylogeny Archive to contain a more or less complete set of phylogeny trees was that of chordates, the group that includes all vertebrates as well as certain invertebrates (the tunicates). The current version of the archive contains phylogeny trees for most groups in the Tree of Life. Mapping the entire Tree of Life is an ambitious goal, and the archive still has some areas of missing information.
As Haaramo was a student of paleontology, the study of extinct organisms, Mikko's Phylogeny Archive explicitly aims to treat extinct organisms as well as living species. Only a few other phylogeny sites, such as the Palaeos database, focus on extinct groups.
The main language of Mikko's Phylogeny Archive is English, although many organisms' common names are given in Finnish. Trees are represented by HTML characters, not by images. Each tree may contain a number of hyperlinks that lead to nested sub-trees, as well as a link back to the super-tree in which it is nested. Thus a user can navigate easily between phylogeny trees for both broad groups and specific groups. The home page links to the phylogeny trees of prominent groups such as Bacteria, Plantae, and Animalia. Information for other groups must be accessed by navigating among the trees.
The individual pages list references taken from textbooks and scientific journals. In cladistics, the result of an analysis often depends on which characteristics are studied,
so there is still no consensus in the scientific community for some phylogenies; Mikko's Phylogeny Archive approaches these disputes by linking to various alternative phylogeny trees where appropriate.
Overall, Mikko's Phylogeny Archive is useful as a casual phylogeny reference. Though not a scholarly reference, it is a strong contribution to publicly available science knowledge.