I saw this short video at a conference last year and was entranced. The clip shows how the ancestral arachnid body plan changed as it evolved through various descendant lineages.
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Just as a toddler who persisently pokes the light socket with a fork, looking for the forbidden jolt, so I invariably open spider links on Live Science. This latest salacious spidey-bit did not disappoint.
Arachnids (you know, spiders and m
In a prior post summarizing the annual Michigan Physiological Society Meeting, I briefly mentioned the work from Adrian Vasquez, Milad Qazazi, Andrew Failla, Sanjay Rama, Sam
OK, that's enough. The proprietor of the Monday Metazoan keeps lurching over to big furries -- where are my clackety arachnids? My slimy molluscs? My exotic weird phyla?
Wot? No harvestmen?
Yeah, I noticed that. Where should they go in the tree?
Oh, um, yeah, there is that... The latest major study (Shultz, 2007) placed harvestmen (with underwhelming support) as the sister taxon to scorpions, but I wouldn't be surprised if this changed again in the future.
Thanks! This was AWESOME =D
Hmmm... someone should do these for as much of the tree of life as possible! Some place where you can just click and watch your favourite lineage evolve through time!