Using parsimony to reconstruct ancestral character states on a phylogenetic tree has become
a popular method for testing ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. Despite its popularity…

Pancrustacea (Hexapoda plus Crustacea) display an enormous diversity of eye designs,
including multiple types of compound eyes and single-chambered eyes, often with color vision …

We describe the draft genome of the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex, which is only 200
megabases and contains at least 30,907 genes. The high gene count is a consequence of an …

Sponges are an ancient group of animals that diverged from other metazoans over 600 million
years ago. Here we present the draft genome sequence of Amphimedon queenslandica, …

Background The last third of the 20 th Century featured an accumulation of research findings
that severely challenged the assumptions of the "Modern Synthesis" which provided the …

Background Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in
greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing …

Loss of biological diversity because of extinction is one of the most pronounced changes to
the global environment. For several decades, researchers have tried to understand how …

Phylogenetic information is increasingly being used to understand the assembly of biological
communities and ecological processes. However, commonly used metrics of phylogenetic …

Background The evolution of complex sub-cellular structures such as the synapse requires
the assembly of multiple proteins, each conferring added functionality to the integrated …

An ambitious, yet fundamental goal for comparative biology is to understand the evolutionary
relationships for all of life. However, many important taxonomic groups have remained …