Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Adamowicz SJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2290764 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Adamowicz Sarah J SJ Purvis Andy A Wills Matthew A MA
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080317 12
The prospect of finding macroevolutionary trends and rules in the history of life is tremendously appealing, but very few pervasive trends have been found. Here, we demonstrate a parallel increase in the morphological complexity of most of the deep lineages within a major clade. We focus on the Crustacea, measuring the morphological differentiation of limbs. First, we show a clear trend of increasing complexity among 66 free-living, ordinal-level taxa from the Phanerozoic fossil record. We next ...[more]