Here is a link to an "open access" paper that details our work on the phylogeny and evolutionary diversification of Acanthomorpha. This lineage comprises nearly one third of all living vertebrate species. See if you can find where the Percidae and Centrarchidae reside in this big phylogeny.

http://www.pnas.org/...661110.abstract

Thanks Tom, I dunno why I'm so fascinated with phylogeny trees, but I can study/stare at them for hours the way my son does with Pokemon or Minecraft. Any surprises or interesting differences between this phylogeny and the 2012 papers with Smith, Wainwright, etc?

... and wouldn't that circular phylogeny diagram make an awesome tatoo? I would need a much larger chest of course ...

EDIT: Just noticed that seahorses, sticklebacks, and Indostomus (armored stickleback) are all on completely divergent branches from each other. (Seahorses go with gurnards & dragonets; sticklebacks go with sculpins & eelpouts; Indostomus goes with swamp eels).

I'm curious are morphology-oriented taxonomists (if there's any still alive) conceding defeat to the DNA taxonomists, or are they disputing this stuff, and if so what arguments are they offering?

Edited by gerald, 17 July 2013 - 03:39 PM.

Thank you for posting this! It's a great resource and I particularly like how the graphics were arranged so it's easy for a relatively clueless someone like me to get a "feel" of where things sit. Nice work (Gerald, your son has good taste in videogames! )

Gerald, Well there is some reluctance, but another group has already proposed a new classification based on a similar phylogeny. I think the trees are the best explanations of the data and there really is no "morphological" dataset that would reject this hypothesis. The morphological perspective really works best at delimiting the classic families delimited by Gill in the 1870s and C.T. Regan in the early 1900s. Of course, those perspectives were not based on explicit phylogenetic analysis of any data. Phylogenetic systematics was not invented until the 1950s by Willi Hennig (http://en.wikipedia....ki/Willi_Hennig).

As for similarity to Smith, his work has been based mostly on short stretches of mitochondrial DNA and very little nuclear DNA. So our results differ from his only in that our trees are more resolved and have higher branch support. Leo Smith is a coauthor on these papers.

The DNA sequence data from the Wainwright et al. paper was collected in my lab and represents a subset of the data presented in our two PNAS papers, so this work is a natural extension of these earlier studies.

As for resolving seahorses, sticklebacks, and Indostomus in dramatically divergent clades, nearly every molecular analysis obtains this result. Our analysis uses only nuclear genes, but a similar resolution is obtained from analyses of whole mitochondrial DNA sequences.

Orangespot, thank you for the kind words. The big tree diagrams were a heck of a lot of fun to put together. In fact, the six years that I have been working on this project have been like a long and intensive ichthyology course that covers the entire diversity of ray-finned fishes.