The phylogeny of all major insect lineages reveals how and when insects diversified and provides a comprehensive reliable scaffold for future comparative analyses of evolutionary innovations among insects.
This review highlights the opportunities that development of arid conditions provides for rapid and diverse evolutionary radiations, and re-enforces the emerging view that Pleistocene environmental change can have diverse impacts on genetic structure and diversity in different biomes.
It is demonstrated that flies experienced three episodes of rapid radiation—lower Diptera (220 Ma), lower Brachycera (180 Ma), and Schizophora (65 Ma)—and a number of life history transitions to hematophagy, phytophagy and parasitism in the history of fly evolution over 260 million y.
The Bactrocera dorsalis complex of tropical fruit flies contains 75 described species, largely endemic to Southeast Asia, and development of a phylogeny of the group is considered a high priority to provide a framework for future evolutionary and ecological studies.
Evidence from nucleotide sequences of six single-copy nuclear protein coding genes used to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships and estimate evolutionary divergence times is presented, finding strong support for a close relationship between Coleoptera (beetles) and Strepsiptera, a previously proposed, but analytically controversial relationship.
The aims are to review and refine key hypotheses derived from palaeoclimatic data and the fossil record that are critical to understanding the evolution of the Australian mesic biota and examine predictions arising from these hypotheses using available molecular phylogenetic and phylogeographical data.
Significant areas critical to future advances in understanding dipteran phylogeny include the relationships among the basal infraorders of Diptera and Brachycera and the relationships between the superfamilies of acalyptrates.
Divergence times based on the 28S rDNA and several fossil constraints indicate that the Brachycera originated in the late Triassic or earliest Mesozoic and that all major lower brachyceran fly lineages had near contemporaneous origins in the mid-Jurassic prior to the origin of flowering plants.
A review of the current consensus of insect relationships provides a foundation for comparative study and offers a framework to evaluate incoming genomic evidence.
The COII gene shows promise for questions concerning alpha taxonomy but appears to be of limited use for resolving deeper relationships within the Anopheles, according to a cladistic analysis of sequence variation within the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit II gene.