"We've never really known how arthropods, the most successful animals on Earth, evolved into the diversity we see today," said research scientist and co-author Dr. Regina Wetzer. "For me, what makes this study really exciting is getting such a solid understanding of how these animals are related, so that now we can better understand how they evolved."
Because of their amazing diversity, deciphering the evolutionary history and relationships among the major subgroups of arthropods has proven difficult. Scientists have tried using various combinations of features, in recent years including DNA sequences, to try to understand which groups are related through common ancestors. To date, those attempts have been stymied by the sheer number of species and wild shape variations between the various groups.
One of the most important results of this new study is support for the hypothesis that the insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. So flies, honeybees, ants, and crickets all branched off the arthropod family tree from within the lineage that gave rise to today's crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. Another important finding is that the "Chelicerata" (a group that includes the spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites) branched off very early, earlier than the millipedes, centipedes, crustaceans, and insects. That means that the spiders, for example, are more distantly related to the insects than many researchers previously thought.
This team approached the problem of illuminating the arthropod family tree by using genetic data (DNA sequences) obtained from 75 species carefully selected to sample the range of arthropod diversity. Many previous analyses were based on the sequences of a handful of genes. The researchers in this study, knowing the daunting d
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| Contact: Kristin Friedrich kfriedri@nhm.org 213-763-3532 Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Source:Eurekalert |