Retraction mechanisms of extant Zoanthidea are more diverse, and their evolutionary histories more complex, than previously recognized.
Until this point, there hasn't been a lot of evidence to support the idea that sexual selection could make species more diverse, says Fredric Vencl, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The numbers of subtilase genes in all plant species analyzed to date have been higher than in humans, suggesting their potentially more diverse function or different evolutionary mechanisms in plants.
"What we are beginning to realise is that our recent evolutionary history is much more diverse than we realised," said Matthew Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution, lead author on the paper in Science that describes the wrist bone analysis.
Thus, it appears we are sampling the evolutionary remnants of a once more diverse and ecologically dominant clade.
Here, genomics analyses of isolates from this rapidly expanding clonal population offered an opportunity to observe the molecular evolutionary changes often obscured in more diverse populations.
Evolutionary rates within Spirogyra are more diverse than previously expected; significant differences among clades and sequences outside the same clade prevail.
Right away, however, the authors remark that if an ORF is conserved in more genomes, and, better yet, in several relatively diverse evolutionary lineages, then it is most likely not spurious.
These introns exhibited diverse evolutionary patterns, with the state with more size-expandable introns being plesiomorphic and introns 1, 4, and 10 being ancestrally small.
