Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Blind Cousins to the Arthropod Superstars

Twitter doesn't work for this "Tweet"; 140 characters is too limited.

This article, Blind Cousins to the Arthropod Superstars (by Carl Zimmer, posting on Discover) clears up a few things for me. I always wondered about centipedes and millipedes, how they fitted in.

And it turns out that waterbears are related to the spiders. Distantly, of course.

And here's a handy "tree" from that article. The insects fit under Crustacea. Who knew? And I like the new designation, "Miracrustacea". "Mira", in Spanish means, "Look here!"

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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:26 pm

    I would very much like to get my hands on a full copy of the original article!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The link "Blind Cousins..." goes to the full article in Discover. Or did you mean the original scientific paper? I haven't seen a link to that.

    There is another article, at Duke University, Surprising New Branches on Arthropod Family Tree.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I found the link to the original paper: Arthropod relationships revealed by phylogenomic analysis of nuclear protein-coding sequences.

    I don't know if you have access, though; I don't.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous5:24 am

    Sadly, I don't have access, not even through my university account. I'll have to wait 'till it's in print I guess (that's the advance e-version). Boo, hiss. Thanks for looking though!

    ReplyDelete

I'm having to moderate all comments because Blogger seems to have a problem notifying me. Sorry about that. I will review them several times daily, though, until this issue is fixed.

Also, I have word verification on, because I found out that not only do I get spam without it, but it gets passed on to anyone commenting in that thread. Not cool!

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