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Evolution of fish to tetrapods. The basic body plan has been phylogenetically constrained. Most terrestrial vertebrates have a body plan that consist of four limbs. The phylogenetic inertia hypothesis suggests that this body plan is observed, not because it happens to be optimal, but because tetrapods are derived from a clade of fishes (Sarcopterygii) which also have four limbs.
In 1885 Ussov named Owsiannikov's "parasitic larva" Polypodium hydriforme and gave a morphological description of the parasite. [5] Polypodium was long considered a unique intracellular parasite among cnidarians. [6] [7] Its hosts include 14 species of Acipenser, 2 species of Huso, Polyodon spathula [6] and Scaphirhynchus platorynchus. [2]
Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. One proposed definition of constraint is "A property of a trait that, although possibly adaptive in the environment in which it originally evolved, acts to place limits on the production of new phenotypic variants."
Marine larval ecology is the study of the factors influencing dispersing larvae, which many marine invertebrates and fishes have. Marine animals with a larva typically release many larvae into the water column, where the larvae develop before metamorphosing into adults.
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
In phylogenetics, a plesiomorphy ("near form") and symplesiomorphy are synonyms for an ancestral character shared by all members of a clade, which does not distinguish the clade from other clades. Plesiomorphy, symplesiomorphy, apomorphy, and synapomorphy all mean a trait shared between species because they share an ancestral species. [a]
The principle of phylogenetic reconciliation was introduced in 1979 [14] to account for differences between genes and species-level phylogenies. In a parsimonious setting, two evolutionary events, gene duplication and gene loss were invoked to explain the discrepancies between a gene tree and a species tree.
A particularly strict form of evolutionary systematics has been presented by Richard H. Zander in a number of papers, but summarized in his "Framework for Post-Phylogenetic Systematics". [ 13 ] Briefly, Zander's pluralistic systematics is based on the incompleteness of each of the theories: A method that cannot falsify a hypothesis is as ...