Du, Kun-Sheng;
Guo, Jin;
Losso, Sarah R;
Pates, Stephen;
Li, Ming;
Chen, Ai-Lin;
(2024)
Multiple origins of dorsal ecdysial sutures in trilobites and their relatives.
Elife
, 12
, Article RP93113. 10.7554/eLife.93113.
Preview |
PDF
Multiple origins of dorsal ecdysial sutures in trilobites and their relatives.pdf - Accepted Version Download (15MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Euarthropods are an extremely diverse phylum in the modern, and have been since their origination in the early Palaeozoic. They grow through moulting the exoskeleton (ecdysis) facilitated by breaking along lines of weakness (sutures). Artiopodans, a group that includes trilobites and their non-biomineralizing relatives, dominated arthropod diversity in benthic communities during the Palaeozoic. Most trilobites - a hyperdiverse group of tens of thousands of species - moult by breaking the exoskeleton along cephalic sutures, a strategy that has contributed to their high diversity during the Palaeozoic. However, the recent description of similar sutures in early diverging non-trilobite artiopodans means that it is unclear whether these sutures evolved deep within Artiopoda, or convergently appeared multiple times within the group. Here, we describe new well-preserved material of Acanthomeridion, a putative early diverging artiopodan, including hitherto unknown details of its ventral anatomy and appendages revealed through CT scanning, highlighting additional possible homologous features between the ventral plates of this taxon and trilobite free cheeks. We used three coding strategies treating ventral plates as homologous to trilobite-free cheeks, to trilobite cephalic doublure, or independently derived. If ventral plates are considered homologous to free cheeks, Acanthomeridion is recovered sister to trilobites, however, dorsal ecdysial sutures are still recovered at many places within Artiopoda. If ventral plates are considered homologous to doublure or non-homologous, then Acanthomeridion is not recovered as sister to trilobites, and thus the ventral plates represent a distinct feature to trilobite doublure/free cheeks.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Multiple origins of dorsal ecdysial sutures in trilobites and their relatives |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.7554/eLife.93113 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.93113 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023, Du, Guo et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | arthropoda, cambrian, chengjiang biota, dorsal suture, ecdysis, evolutionary biology, none, Animals, Fossils, Arthropods, Biological Evolution, Phylogeny, Molting |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10208437 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
