New Scientist
Image: Foto di Spalle
Out of crisis comes opportunity. An asteroid-triggered mass extinction 65 million years ago famously wiped out the dinosaurs – but it may also have helped establish the modern reef fish communities.
Coral reefs are home to 7 per cent of all vertebrate species, despite occupying less than 0.01 per cent of Earth’s surface, and there is a mind-boggling array of reef fish. But about 92 per cent of them belong to one group: the acanthomorphs.
Samantha Price at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues looked at the features of today’s reef and non-reef acanthomorphs to establish the ecological niches they occupy. The team then plotted that information on an evolutionary tree of acanthomorphs that they had built last year using DNA data. Doing so allowed them to pinpoint when in prehistory the different kinds of acanthomorph moved onto reefs. Read more on newscientist.com…
