IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcom/v4y2013i1d10.1038_ncomms3485.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Arthropod fossil data increase congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies

Author

Listed:
  • David A. Legg

    (Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London
    The Natural History Museum
    Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

  • Mark D. Sutton

    (Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London)

  • Gregory D. Edgecombe

    (The Natural History Museum)

Abstract

The relationships of major arthropod clades have long been contentious, but refinements in molecular phylogenetics underpin an emerging consensus. Nevertheless, molecular phylogenies have recovered topologies that morphological phylogenies have not, including the placement of hexapods within a paraphyletic Crustacea, and an alliance between myriapods and chelicerates. Here we show enhanced congruence between molecular and morphological phylogenies based on 753 morphological characters for 309 fossil and Recent panarthropods. We resolve hexapods within Crustacea, with remipedes as their closest extant relatives, and show that the traditionally close relationship between myriapods and hexapods is an artefact of convergent character acquisition during terrestrialisation. The inclusion of fossil morphology mitigates long-branch artefacts as exemplified by pycnogonids: when fossils are included, they resolve with euchelicerates rather than as a sister taxon to all other euarthropods.

Suggested Citation

  • David A. Legg & Mark D. Sutton & Gregory D. Edgecombe, 2013. "Arthropod fossil data increase congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 4(1), pages 1-7, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:4:y:2013:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms3485
    DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3485
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3485
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/ncomms3485?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lorenzo Lustri & Pierre Gueriau & Allison C. Daley, 2024. "Lower Ordovician synziphosurine reveals early euchelicerate diversity and evolution," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-12, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:4:y:2013:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms3485. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.