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Life, Earth & Environment
Seminar Series
When: Wednesday 5th August, 12 – 1 pm Where: Natural Resources Building, Lecture Theatre 1 (EM1) Large cenDpedes, larger datasets and the role of morphology in the genomic era Dr Greg Edgecombe Department of Earth Sciences, The Natural History Museum London Scolopendromorpha includes the largest and most fiercely predatory cen5pedes, totalling more than 700 species worldwide. Subjected to phylogene5c analysis since the late 1990s, early studies drew on small sets of external morphological characters, mostly those used in classical taxonomic works. In order to bolster the character sample, new anatomical data were worked up by systema5cally sampling the group’s diversity in order to formulate new characters from understudied structures/organ systems. Simultaneously, targeted sequencing of a few markers for a growing number of species provided molecular es5mates of phylogeny. These have resulted in stable higher-­‐level rela5onships that predict a single origin of blindness in three lineages that share this trait, and are now backed up by transcriptomic datasets sampling up to 2100+ genes that include exemplars of all major groups. The tradeoff between matrix occupancy and gene number (i.e., the amount of missing data) is explored with reference to higher-­‐
level cen5pede phylogeny, using morphology as the “reality check”. Explicit matrices of morphological characters and fossils coded as terminal taxa remain vital to total evidence da5ng/5p da5ng of the tree and add rigour to age constraints in node calibra5on approaches to da5ng. Biography Greg Edgecombe is a Merit Researcher at the London NHM and an Associate in Invertebrate Zoology at Harvard’s Museum of ComparaBve Zoology. Greg’s research focuses on the evoluBonary history of arthropods, animal diversificaBon during the Cambrian explosion, and the systemaBcs of Chilopoda (cenBpedes). Hosted by: Dr John Paterson: [email protected] Contact: Dr Rose Andrew: [email protected] Dr Emma SherraZ: [email protected]