Three waves of evolutionary innovation shaped diversity of vertebrates, genome analysis reveals
Thursday, August 18, 2011 - 15:31
in Biology & Nature
Over the past 530 million years, the vertebrate lineage branched out from a primitive jawless fish wriggling through Cambrian seas to encompass all the diverse forms of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Now researchers combing through the DNA sequences of vertebrate genomes have identified three distinct periods of evolutionary innovation that accompanied this remarkable diversification.