Animal Phylogeny and Its Evolutionary Implications

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  • Casey W. Dunn
    Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912;
  • Gonzalo Giribet
    Museum of Comparative Zoology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138;
  • Gregory D. Edgecombe
    Department of Earth Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom;
  • Andreas Hejnol
    Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology, University of Bergen, 5008 Bergen, Norway;

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<jats:p> In recent years, scientists have made remarkable progress reconstructing the animal phylogeny. There is broad agreement regarding many deep animal relationships, including the monophyly of animals, Bilateria, Protostomia, Ecdysozoa, and Spiralia. This stability now allows researchers to articulate the diminishing number of remaining questions in terms of well-defined alternative hypotheses. These remaining questions include relationships at the base of the animal tree, the position of Xenacoelomorpha, and the internal relationships of Spiralia. Recent progress in the field of animal phylogeny has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of development, morphology, genomes, and other characters. A remarkable pattern emerges—there is far more homoplasy for all these characters than had previously been anticipated, even among many complex characters such as segmentation and nervous systems. The fossil record dates most deep branches of the animal tree to an evolutionary radiation in the early Cambrian with roots in the Late Neoproterozoic. </jats:p>

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