Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2022 Feb 9;289(1968):20212093. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2093.
Once considered 'weird wonders' of the Cambrian, the emblematic Burgess Shale animals and are now recognized as lower stem-group euarthropods and have provided crucial data for constraining the polarity of key morphological characters in the group. and its relatives (radiodonts) had worldwide distribution and survived until at least the Devonian. However, despite intense study, remains the only formally described opabiniid to date. Here we reinterpret a fossil from the Wheeler Formation of Utah as a new opabiniid, nov. gen. et sp. By visualizing the sample of phylogenetic topologies in treespace, our results fortify support for the position of beyond the nodal support traditionally applied. Our phylogenetic evidence expands opabiniids to multiple Cambrian stages. Our results underscore the power of treespace visualization for resolving imperfectly preserved fossils and expanding the known diversity and spatio-temporal ranges within the euarthropod lower stem group.
曾经被认为是寒武纪“奇异奇观”的标志性伯吉斯页岩动物和现在被认为是下干群节肢动物，为限制该类群关键形态特征的极性提供了重要数据。 和它的亲属（放射虫）在全球范围内分布，并一直存活到至少泥盆纪。然而，尽管进行了深入的研究，仍然是迄今为止唯一正式描述的 Opabiniidae 。在这里，我们重新解释了来自犹他州惠勒组的一个化石，作为一个新的 Opabiniidae，nov. gen. et sp. 通过可视化树空间中的系统发育拓扑样本，我们的结果支持了的位置超越了传统应用的节点支持。我们的系统发育证据将 Opabiniidae 扩展到多个寒武纪阶段。我们的结果强调了树空间可视化在解决保存不完整的化石以及扩大节肢动物下干群已知多样性和时空范围方面的强大功能。
