This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A large-scale study of nearly 700 species reveals the evolutionary relationships and history of Neogastropoda, a diverse group of marine snails. The findings provide new evidence for their single origin, identify four new families and reveal a previously undetected burst of diversification in the early Cenozoic.
Biological diversity is fascinating and inspiring, yet much of it remains poorly known. This is particularly true of marine invertebrates, many of which are small, have cryptic lifestyles or live in environments that remain underexplored. One such group is the Neogastropoda, an order of marine snails that includes around 16,000 known species, with many more still undescribed.
These small predators and scavengers of the seafloor are perhaps best known for their often striking shells. But despite their diversity and long evolutionary history, fundamental questions about the group have remained unresolved: How are many Neogastropoda species related to one another, and when did the major groups emerge? A new study involving researchers from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and a large international team now provides new answers to these questions.
By combining material from natural history collections around the world with phylogenomic analyses, the researchers have assembled a dataset comprising nearly 700 species—providing a solid basis for reconstructing the evolutionary history of the group. The study provides, for the first time, strong evidence that all the diverse groups currently placed within Neogastropoda share a single evolutionary origin. In other words, the many different lineages of these marine snails are indeed relatives.
The researchers also identified four new families of Neogastropoda. Together with a newly proposed classification, these findings provide a framework for future taxonomic research and species descriptions. Such work is important because a large proportion of biodiversity remains undocumented.
Species that are small, cryptic or difficult to access are particularly likely to remain unknown to science. Without a clear understanding of how species are related, it is also difficult to interpret their evolutionary history or place newly discovered species within it. The study also changes the picture of when the major Neogastropoda lineages emerged.
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