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A Silurian armoured aplacophoran and implications for molluscan phylogeny

Nature volume 490, pages 94–97 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Mollusca is one of the most diverse, important and well-studied invertebrate phyla; however, relationships among major molluscan taxa have long been a subject of controversy1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. In particular, the position of the shell-less vermiform Aplacophora and its relationship to the better-known Polyplacophora (chitons) have been problematic: Aplacophora has been treated as a paraphyletic or monophyletic group at the base of the Mollusca3,6,8, proximate to other derived clades such as Cephalopoda2,3,10, or as sister group to the Polyplacophora, forming the clade Aculifera1,5,7,11,12. Resolution of this debate is required to allow the evolutionary origins of Mollusca to be reconstructed with confidence. Recent fossil finds13,14,15,16 support the Aculifera hypothesis, demonstrating that the Palaeozoic-era palaeoloricate ‘chitons’ included taxa combining certain polyplacophoran and aplacophoran characteristics5. However, fossils combining an unambiguously aplacophoran-like body with chiton-like valves have remained elusive. Here we describe such a fossil, Kulindroplax perissokomos gen. et sp. nov., from the Herefordshire Lagerstätte17,18 (about 425 million years bp), a Silurian deposit preserving a marine biota18 in unusual three-dimensional detail. The specimen is reconstructed three-dimensionally through physical–optical tomography19. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that this and many other palaeoloricate chitons are crown-group aplacophorans.

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Figure 1: Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) C.29641: holotype of Kulindroplax perissokomos.
Figure 2: Summary of parsimony analysis results.

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Acknowledgements

The Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC Grant NE/F018037/1) supported this research. K. Saunders, K. Davies, C. Dean, D. Legg and C. Lewis provided technical assistance, and the staff of Tarmac Western and the late R. Fenn facilitated the fieldwork.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BP, UK,

    Mark D. Sutton

  2. Department of Geology & Geophysics, and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, PO Box 208109, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8109, USA,

    Derek E. G. Briggs

  3. Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK,

    David J. Siveter

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3AN, UK,

    Derek J. Siveter

  5. Geological Collections, University Museum of Natural History, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK,

    Derek J. Siveter

  6. Queen’s University Belfast, School of Biological Sciences, Marine Laboratory, Portaferry, Northern Ireland BT22 1PF, UK,

    Julia D. Sigwart

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Contributions

D.J.S., D.J.S., D.E.G.B. and M.D.S. carried out fieldwork. M.D.S. and J.D.S. performed phylogenetic analyses. M.D.S reconstructed the specimen and wrote the paper, with scientific and editorial input from all other authors.

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Correspondence to Mark D. Sutton.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Notes 1-4, which includes Supplementary Figures, Tables and References, and full details for the Supplementary Data 1-2 files (see separate files for Supplementary Data). (PDF 686 kb)

Supplementary Data 1 (1)

The model is provided as four separate zip archive files to comply with Nature Publishing Group restrictions on the size of individual online files. See Supplementary Information for details on how to view this dataset. (ZIP 27720 kb)

Supplementary Data 1 (2)

The model is provided as four separate zip archive files to comply with Nature Publishing Group restrictions on the size of individual online files. See Supplementary Information for details on how to view this dataset. (ZIP 29196 kb)

Supplementary Data 1 (3)

The model is provided as four separate zip archive files to comply with Nature Publishing Group restrictions on the size of individual online files. See Supplementary Information for details on how to view this dataset. (ZIP 29196 kb)

Supplementary Data 1 (4)

The model is provided as four separate zip archive files to comply with Nature Publishing Group restrictions on the size of individual online files. See Supplementary Information for details on how to view this dataset. (ZIP 27637 kb)

Supplementary Data 2 (1)

Raw serial images (tomograms) of Kulindroplax perissokomos (OUMNH C. 29641) are presented here as highly compressed JPEGs split over two zip archives. (ZIP 18075 kb)

Supplementary Data 2 (2)

Raw serial images (tomograms) of Kulindroplax perissokomos (OUMNH C. 29641) are presented here as highly compressed JPEGs split over two zip archives. (ZIP 12714 kb)

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Sutton, M., Briggs, D., Siveter, D. et al. A Silurian armoured aplacophoran and implications for molluscan phylogeny. Nature 490, 94–97 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11328

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