In recent years, scientists have made remarkable progress reconstructing the animal
phylogeny. There is broad agreement regarding many deep animal relationships, including …

Two hypotheses for the early radiation of the metazoans are vividly discussed in recent
phylogenomic studies, the 'Porifera-first'hypothesis, which places the poriferans as the sister …

The enigmatic animal phylum Placozoa holds a key position in the metazoan Tree of Life. A
simple bauplan makes it appear to be the most basal metazoan known and genetic …

Unraveling the base of metazoan evolution is of crucial importance for rooting the metazoan
Tree of Life. This subject has attracted substantial attention for more than a century and …

Understanding how important phenotypic, developmental, and genomic features of animals
originated and evolved is essential for many fields of biological research, but such …

Providing consistent resolution for the animal tree of life is a major goal of animal
systematists and a desire of every zoologist. Towards this goal, many major nodes have …

Phylogenetics emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a speculative
storytelling discipline dedicated to providing narrative explanations for the evolution of taxa …

The Acoelomorpha is an animal group comprised by nearly 400 species of misleadingly
inconspicuous flatworms. Despite this, acoelomorphs have been at the centre of a heated …

Molecular data and methods have become centrally important to evolutionary analysis,
largely because they have enabled global phylogenetic reconstructions of the relationships …

Understanding the evolution of the neurosensory system of man, able to reflect on its own
origin, is one of the major goals of comparative neurobiology. Details of the origin of …