Good Parenting Evolved Many Times: Moss Animals
Published:26 Apr.2022 Source:Florida Museum of Natural History
But a new study on the 600-million-year history of these obscure animals highlights the important role good parenting has played in their enduring success. In one of the largest genetic analyses of invertebrate marine organisms to date, researchers sequenced DNA from hundreds of alcohol-preserved specimens stored in more than 20 museums around the world.
"There are about 7,000 known species of living bryozoans, and their actual diversity likely numbers in the tens of thousands," said Gustav Paulay, co-author on the study and curator of invertebrate zoology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "They're close to vertebrates in terms of diversity, and yet we hardly know anything about them. This is the first big phylogenetic study of the group." The researchers, led by a team at the University of Oslo in Norway, used DNA sequences to map out the relationships among species and trace their way back to key events that occurred throughout the evolutionary history of bryozoans. Their results indicate that species in the order Cheilostomatida, which today make up about 80% of bryozoan diversity, evolved specialized nursery cells on at least five separate occasions.