If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. The tree of life can be a tool of discovery. Armed with a knowledge of the relationships of different taxa and their distribution in the stratigraphic column, we can make predictions about the kinds of creatures yet to be discovered in the fossil record. Often these tools can be used to recover creatures with features that are intermediate between major taxa, such as between fish and limbed animals. Interestingly, a knowledge of the fossil record, when placed in a phylogenetic context, suggests experiments in molecular biology by enabling predictions of the kinds of genes and pattern-forming processes that exist in basal taxa. This ability to use different lines of data as tools to predict discovery in each field is a demonstration of the power of the information contained in the tree of life.