ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6708-8332
Current Organisation
Harvard University
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Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 09-02-2022
Abstract: Once considered ‘weird wonders’ of the Cambrian, the emblematic Burgess Shale animals Anomalocaris and Opabinia are now recognized as lower stem-group euarthropods and have provided crucial data for constraining the polarity of key morphological characters in the group. Anomalocaris and its relatives (radiodonts) had worldwide distribution and survived until at least the Devonian. However, despite intense study, Opabinia remains the only formally described opabiniid to date. Here we reinterpret a fossil from the Wheeler Formation of Utah as a new opabiniid, Utaurora comosa nov. gen. et sp. By visualizing the s le of phylogenetic topologies in treespace, our results fortify support for the position of U. comosa beyond the nodal support traditionally applied. Our phylogenetic evidence expands opabiniids to multiple Cambrian stages. Our results underscore the power of treespace visualization for resolving imperfectly preserved fossils and expanding the known ersity and spatio-temporal ranges within the euarthropod lower stem group.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-08-2011
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE10267
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2016
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 12-12-2022
DOI: 10.1101/2022.12.09.519815
Abstract: For much of terrestrial bio ersity, the evolutionary pathways of adaptation from marine ancestors are poorly understood, and have usually been viewed as a binary trait. True crabs, the decapod crustacean infraorder Brachyura, comprise over 7,600 species representing a striking ersity of morphology and ecology, including repeated adaptation to non-marine habitats. Here, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of Brachyura using new and published sequences of 10 genes for 344 tips spanning 88 of 109 families. Using 36 newly vetted fossil calibrations, we infer that brachyurans most likely erged in the Triassic, with family-level splits in the late Cretaceous and early Paleogene. By contrast, the root age is underestimated with automated s ling of 328 fossil occurrences explicitly incorporated into the tree prior, suggesting such models are a poor fit under heterogeneous fossil preservation. We apply recently defined trait-by-environment associations to classify a gradient of transitions from marine to terrestrial lifestyles. We estimate that crabs left the marine environment at least seven and up to 17 times convergently, and returned to the sea from non-marine environments at least twice. Although the most highly terrestrial- and many freshwater-adapted crabs are concentrated in Thoracotremata, Bayesian threshold models of ancestral state reconstruction fail to identify shifts to higher terrestrial grades due to the degree of underlying change required. Lineages throughout our tree inhabit intertidal and marginal marine environments, corroborating the inference that the early stages of terrestrial adaptation have a lower threshold to evolve. Our framework and extensive new fossil and natural history datasets will enable future comparisons of non-marine adaptation at the morphological and molecular level. Crabs provide an important window into the early processes of adaptation to novel environments, and different degrees of evolutionary constraint that might help predict these pathways.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 11-03-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.03.10.434726
Abstract: Once considered ‘weird wonders’ of the Cambrian, the emblematic Burgess Shale animals Anomalocaris and Opabinia are now recognized as lower stem-group euarthropods. Anomalocaris and its relatives (radiodonts) had a worldwide distribution and survived until at least the Devonian, whereas - despite intense study - Opabinia remains the only formally described opabiniid to date. Here we reinterpret a fossil from the Wheeler Formation of Utah as a new opabiniid, KUMIP 314087. By visualizing the s le of phylogenetic topologies in treespace, our results fortify support for the position of KUMIP 314087 beyond the nodal support traditionally applied. Our phylogenetic evidence expands opabiniids to multiple Cambrian Stages spanning approximately five million years. Our results underscore the power of treespace visualization for resolving imperfectly preserved fossils and expanding the known ersity and spatiotemporal ranges within the euarthropod lower stem group. This work contains a new biological name. New names in preprints are not considered available by the ICZN. To avoid ambiguity, the new biological name is not included in this preprint, and the specimen number (KUMIP 314087) is used as a placeholder. Cover image. Artistic reconstruction of the new opabiniid from the Wheeler Formation, Utah, USA (Cambrian: Drumian). Artwork by F. Anthony.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 2013
Location: United States of America
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Joanna M. Wolfe.