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Vertebrate palaeontology

Evolutionary cut and paste

Nature volume 394, pages 12–13 (1998)Cite this article

Fossil discoveries can muddle our attempts to construct simple evolutionary trees — fossils from key periods are often not intermediates, but rather hodgepodges of defining features of many different groups. The latest example of this phenomenon is announced on page 66 of this issue1, where Jennifer Clack describes a 334-million-year-old fossil amphibian that displays, in the same animal, characters that are usually associated with three different types of primitive tetrapod. This discovery has implications for our understanding of how evolution proceeds and of how new groups of animals are assembled over geological time.

Extant amphibians and reptiles are distinct — anyone can tell a frog from a lizard. But add some fossil representatives of these groups, and much of their distinctiveness breaks down. This situation, where a fossil discovery reduces phylogenetic resolution rather than increases it, has recently arisen in several other contexts in vertebrate evolutionary biology. For example, living tetrapods have a variety of innovations that separate them from fish. Perhaps the most famous of these are the loss of internal gills and the origin of digits, both of which are features usually associated with the invasion of land. Discoveries of internal gills in the tetrapod Acanthostega2, and finger-like structures in the Devonian fish Sauripterus3, however, show the futility of relying on such characters to identify major groups. In both cases, the surprising implication is that these features may have arisen several times during the evolution of tetrapods. An identical problem is encountered in the evolution of birds and feathers. Although living birds are unique in their possession of feathers, recently discovered theropod dinosaurs show that different types of feather-like structures evolved several times in closely related theropods4. The main conclusion to draw from these discoveries is that ‘key’ characters can arise independently in different taxa and in different functional settings.

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Figure 1: Palaeontological mix-up.

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  1. the Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 19104-6018, Pennsylvania, USA

    Neil Shubin

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Shubin, N. Evolutionary cut and paste. Nature 394, 12–13 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/27755

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