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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Ablation of a Single Cell From Eight-cell Embryos of the Amphipod Crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis

Ablation of a Single Cell From Eight-cell Embryos of the Amphipod Crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis

Published on: March 16, 2014

Increasing morphological complexity in multiple parallel lineages of the Crustacea.

Sarah J Adamowicz¹, Andy Purvis, Matthew A Wills

¹Division of Biology, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Ascot SL5 7PY, United Kingdom.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|March 19, 2008

Summary

Macroevolutionary trends reveal increasing morphological complexity in Crustacea lineages over deep time. This pervasive trend impacts species diversity, influencing both form and number across geological eras.

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary Biology
Paleontology
Morphological Evolution

Background:

The search for macroevolutionary trends in life's history is challenging, with few pervasive patterns identified.
Understanding evolutionary rules and large-scale trends requires robust data across deep time.

Observation:

Morphological complexity of limbs has increased in most deep lineages within the Crustacea clade.
Analysis of 66 free-living, ordinal-level taxa from the Phanerozoic fossil record shows a clear trend of increasing limb complexity.
This trend is pervasive, observed in 10 or 11 of 12 matched-pair comparisons between Paleozoic and Recent taxa across five diversity indices.

Findings:

The observed trend of increasing morphological complexity is distinct from lineage sorting effects.
Newly appearing taxa exhibited more limb types and higher differentiation than the average.
Extinct taxa showed higher limb redundancy compared to the contemporaneous average.

Implications:

This study provides rare evidence of a large-scale, likely driven trend in morphological evolution across multiple independent lineages.
The trend influences both the form and number of species through deep time and into the present.
Patterns of contemporary species diversity partially reflect these long-term paleontological trends.