"Our goal here was to understand the molecular underpinnings of an important evolutionary transition, not to create a 'dino-chicken' simply for the sake of it," he said.
"This is really documenting a very important evolutionary transition," says Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
An important evolutionary transition in the plant kingdom occurred when they began life on land.
Teachers can facilitate such learning by incorporating cladistics and tree-thinking into the curriculum and using evograms to focus on important evolutionary transitions.
Taken together, these results suggest that studying the properties of TE evolution may indicate the timing and nature of important evolutionary transitions.
Analyses of complete eukaryotic genome sequences have revealed that gene duplication has been rampant, and that this process can be linked to important evolutionary transitions or major leaps in development and adaptive radiations of species (see, for example, [ 80, 81]).
The sequenced seven ant species represent important evolutionary transitions including fundamental changes in nutrition (e.g., carnivores, herbivores specialized on seeds, fungivores, or omnivores), expansion into new habitats (from terrestrial to arboreal), or social organization (supplementary text S1, Supplementary Material online, for details and Gadau et al. 2012, for a review).
This work identifies a large-scale molecular correlate of a difference between larval and adult body plans, and demonstrates that modulating the timing of Hox expression may have played an important role in the evolutionary transition between direct and indirect development in hemichordates.
A newly described stem lagomorph, Dawsonolagus, gives important insights into the evolutionary transition of premolars within duplicidentates [35].
With reference to the divergence of the ancestor of P. horikoshii and P. abyssi from the common ancestor, and also the divergence of P. horikoshii and P. abyssi from each other, a no less important evolutionary factor may be their transition to new roles in bacterial community.
Padian (2008) suggests depicting these various lines of evidence, particularly the ones that are important in major evolutionary transitions, in a single diagram, called an "evogram" (Fig. 3), to help students to understand that evolutionary research is conducted in an integrative way and in a way that relies on testing independent lines of evidence against each other to demonstrate concordance.
