ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Evolution of metazoan morphological disparity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mechanisms of Phenotypic Evolution from Molecules to Organisms: Integrating Evolutionary Biochemistry and Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2026Article
- Comparing apples and oranges (and pinecones): understanding patterns of reproductive disparity across seed plants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Characterization, functional exploration, and evolutionary analysis of mirtronic microRNAs reveal their origin in the invasive vector mosquito, Aedes albopictus.Insect science · 2026Article
- Uniqueness and predictability in evolution and the history of mollusks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Pulsed evolution shaped extant angiosperm pollen disparity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The structure of an ancient genotype-phenotype map shaped the functional evolution of a protein family.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Substantial Hierarchical Reductions of Genetic and Morphological Traits in the Evolution of Rotiferan Parasites.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Patterns and mechanisms of fungal genome plasticity.Current biology : CB · 2025Review
- Sustained shift in the morphology of organic-walled microfossils over the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Episodic body size variations of early Paleozoic trilobites associated with marine redox changes.Science advances · 2025Article
- The structure of an ancient genotype-phenotype map shaped the functional evolution of a protein family.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Molecular insights into region-specific sexual dichromatism: Comparative transcriptome analysis of red cheek pigmentation in zebra finches.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
- Benthic diel oxygen variability and stress as potential drivers for animal diversification in the Neoproterozoic-Palaeozoic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- MUM, a maternal unknown message, inhibits early establishment of the medio-lateral axis in the embryo of the kelp Saccharina latissima.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Proterozoic microfossils continue to provide new insights into the rise of complex eukaryotic life.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
- Rapid adaptation of cellular metabolic rate to the MicroRNA complements of mammals and its relevance to the evolution of endothermy.iScience · 2024Article
- Soft robotics informs how an early echinoderm moved.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Evolution of phenotypic disparity in the plant kingdom.Nature plants · 2023Article
- Disparification and extinction trade-offs shaped the evolution of Permian to Jurassic Odonata.iScience · 2023Article
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6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The animal kingdom exhibits a great diversity of organismal form (i.e., disparity). Whether the extremes of disparity were achieved early in animal evolutionary history or clades continually explore the limits of possible morphospace is subject to continuing debate. Here we show, through analysis of the disparity of the animal kingdom, that, even though many clades exhibit maximal initial disparity, arthropods, chordates, annelids, echinoderms, and mollusks have continued to explore and expand the limits of morphospace throughout the Phanerozoic, expanding dramatically the envelope of disparity occupied in the Cambrian. The "clumpiness" of morphospace occupation by living clades is a consequence of the extinction of phylogenetic intermediates, indicating that the original distribution of morphologies was more homogeneous. The morphological distances between phyla mirror differences in complexity, body size, and species-level diversity across the animal kingdom. Causal hypotheses of morphologic expansion include time since origination, increases in genome size, protein repertoire, gene family expansion, and gene regulation. We find a strong correlation between increasing morphological disparity, genome size, and microRNA repertoire, but no correlation to protein domain diversity. Our results are compatible with the view that the evolution of gene regulation has been influential in shaping metazoan disparity whereas the invasion of terrestrial ecospace appears to represent an additional gestalt, underpinning the post-Cambrian expansion of metazoan disparity.
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