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Animal development is an elaborate process encoded in the genome. Regulatory genes encode transcription factors and signaling molecules, and their expression is under the control of cis-regulatory modules that define spatially defined transcriptional regulatory states. The functional linkages among these genes constitute the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and changes in their architecture due to...
‘Morphology’ in linguistics is the study of the structure and function of word forms. In this paper, Sections “the structure of word forms: elements and relations” and “the function of word forms: values and systems” will give an insight into the basic notions and subfields of linguistic morphology to illustrate the linguistic approach to structure and function. It will then proceed to identify the...
Morphology has traditionally played a pivotal role in animal phylogeny since the first evolutionary biologists began to decipher the animal tree of life. In recent times, however, morphological characters have lost prominence in inferring deep relationships among animals due to fundamental issues with homology statements and the choice of higher taxa as terminals, but most importantly, due to declining...
The digestive tract is an essential organ system that allows animals to efficiently digest food and take up nutrients to maintain growth and sustain the body. While some animal groups possess a sack-like gut, others possess a tube shaped alimentary canal with an opening for food uptake, the mouth, and an opening for defecation, the anus. The evolutionary origin of the hindgut with the anal opening...
Object categorization is an important research topic not only in the field of biology but also in psychology. So far, however, the mental principles guiding categorization in biology have not been systematically investigated from the viewpoint of psychology. We focused our study on the shape-based categorization processes of decapod crustaceans, incorporating the perspectives of both disciplines in...
Of all evolutionary events that are discussed as novelties, the origin of insect wings is perhaps the most frequently cited. Yet, the novelty discussion on this issue has almost exclusively focused on the dermal folds, which form the exterior parts of the wings. The involvement of the circulatory system, however, has been widely neglected despite its mandatory function in the development and maintenance...
One of the important unanswered questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary innovations originate. Recent advances in evolutionary developmental biology and genomics have put the developmental, mechanistic aspects of evolutionary change into the hands of evolutionary biologists and we now have the means to acquire an experimentally grounded understanding of this important phenomenon. In...
Although most phylogenetic investigations are motivated by questions about the evolution of morphological attributes, morphological data are increasingly rare as a source of characters for reconstructing phylogeny, in part because these attributes are time consuming to collect. Here we describe methods to mine the information contained in classifications as a source of phylogenetic characters, using...
The relationships among the living classes of molluscs have remained contentious, in part because of a lack of consistent morphological characters that unequivocally unite clusters of taxa within this extremely disparate phylum. The osphradium, a chemosensory organ on or near the gills, is a putative potential synapomorphy of Mollusca. Although the osphradium regularly appears on illustrations of...
The origin of the Bilateria and reconstruction of the last common bilaterian ancestor (LCA) are fundamental problems in zoology, including the question whether the LCA was a coelomic creature or not? Insight into the nature of the LCA might be obtained by investigating the coelomic system of poorly studied bilaterians. The Brachiopoda is a relict group of marine invertebrates whose anatomy has been...
This paper and its accompanying artwork examines the history of our perception of nature based on the example of elephants (Elephas maximus, Loxodonta africana, Loxodonta cyclotis). With the fall of the Roman Empire up until the late Middle Ages, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how these animals actually looked, illustrators had to rely on...
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