Resolution of ray-finned fish phylogeny and timing of diversification.

The Timing of Timezyme Diversification in Vertebrates

All biological functions in vertebrates are synchronized with daily and seasonal changes in the environment by the time keeping hormone melatonin. Its nocturnal surge is primarily due to the rhythmic activity of the arylalkylamine N-acetyl transferase AANAT, which thus became the focus of many investigations regarding its evolution and function. Various vertebrate isoforms have been reported fr...

Endoskeletal structure in Cheirolepis (Osteichthyes, Actinopterygii), An early ray‐finned fish

As the sister lineage of all other actinopterygians, the Middle to Late Devonian (Eifelian-Frasnian) Cheirolepis occupies a pivotal position in vertebrate phylogeny. Although the dermal skeleton of this taxon has been exhaustively described, very little of its endoskeleton is known, leaving questions of neurocranial and fin evolution in early ray-finned fishes unresolved. The model for early ac...

A Genome-scale Approach to Phylogeny of Ray-finned Fish (Actinopterygii) and Molecular Systematics of Clupeiformes

A Phylogenomic Perspective on the Radiation of Ray-Finned Fishes Based upon Targeted Sequencing of Ultraconserved Elements (UCEs)

Ray-finned fishes constitute the dominant radiation of vertebrates with over 32,000 species. Although molecular phylogenetics has begun to disentangle major evolutionary relationships within this vast section of the Tree of Life, there is no widely available approach for efficiently collecting phylogenomic data within fishes, leaving much of the enormous potential of massively parallel sequenci...

Eighty-five million years of Pacific Ocean gyre ecosystem structure: long-term stability marked by punctuated change.

While the history of taxonomic diversification in open ocean lineages of ray-finned fish and elasmobranchs is increasingly known, the evolution of their roles within the open ocean ecosystem remains poorly understood. To assess the relative importance of these groups through time, we measured the accumulation rate of microfossil fish teeth and elasmobranch dermal denticles (ichthyoliths) in dee...