Mosquito, house fly share common ancestry
April 3rd, 2011 - 2:24 pm ICT by ANIWashington, April 03 (ANI): The mosquito branched off the same evolutionary tree as the housefly around 220 million years ago, according to a new study.
Some may think that the mosquito and the house fly are worlds apart when it comes to common ancestry, but the new research by an international team of scientists puts them much closer together in evolutionary history.
The March fly branched off some 175 million years ago, while the common housefly branched off about 50 million years ago.
“What this research shows us is that the Fly Tree of Life went through three periods of fast diversification, with many different groups experimenting with ways to be a fly,” said one of the paper’s co-authors, David Yeates from CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences.
“The mosquito, March fly and common house fly are everyday members of these bursts of evolution, which occurred during unstable periods of Earth’s history when dramatic environmental change created new habitats for these ‘experimental’ flies.
“The really interesting thing is that living representatives of these early branching groups, such as mosquitoes and March flies, are still with us.
“This research provides an evolutionary framework for future comparative work on species that are critically important to both society and science,” Yeates added.
The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. (ANI)
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Tags: ancestry, common housefly, comparative work, csiro, diversification, ecosystem sciences, environmental change, evolutionary framework, evolutionary history, evolutionary tree, experimenting with ways, million years, mosquito, mosquito march, mosquitoes, national academy of sciences, proceedings of the national academy, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, tree of life, yeates