Recently, I described a clever trick to plot a phylogenetic tree in a semi-circular “arc” format. This type of plot is popular in the literature, but I wasn’t aware of an R phylogenetics plotting method that could make plots of this style.
I’m still working out the bugs, but I have now added this feature to various phytools plotting methods. Where available, we can access it by setting the argument type
to type="arc"
.
Let’s see.
library(phytools)
packageVersion("phytools")
## [1] '1.8.6'
First, let’s plot a phylogeny using plotTree
. This phylogeny of Mycalesina butterflies comes from Halali et al. (2020).
data(butterfly.tree)
butterfly.tree
##
## Phylogenetic tree with 287 tips and 286 internal nodes.
##
## Tip labels:
## Bra_peitho_gigas, Bra_decira, Bra_simonsii, Bra_perspicua, Bra_phaea, Tel_adolphei, ...
##
## Rooted; includes branch lengths.
plotTree(ladderize(butterfly.tree),type="arc",fsize=0.3,
lwd=1,ftype="i",arc_height=1.5)