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The butterflies form the clade Rhopalocera, which is composed of three superfamilies: Hedyloidea (the moth butterfly family Hedylidae), the Hesperioidea (the skipper family Hesperiidae), and the Papilionoidea (the true butterfly families Papilionidae, Pieridae, Nymphalidae, Lycaenidae, and Riodinidae). All of these families are monophyletic.
Butterflies evolved from moths, so while the butterflies are monophyletic (forming a single clade), the moths are not. The oldest known butterfly is Protocoeliades kristenseni from the Palaeocene aged Fur Formation of Denmark, approximately 55 million years old, which belongs to the family Hesperiidae (skippers). [ 9 ]
The Rhopalocera, comprising the Papilionoidea (butterflies), Hesperioidea (skippers), and the Hedyloidea (moth-butterflies), are the most recently evolved. [9] There is quite a good fossil record for this group, with the oldest skipper dating from 56 million years ago .
Evolution has produced astonishing variety of appendages in insects, such as these antennae.. The most recent understanding of the evolution of insects is based on studies of the following branches of science: molecular biology, insect morphology, paleontology, insect taxonomy, evolution, embryology, bioinformatics and scientific computing.
The evolution of birds began in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from a clade of theropod dinosaurs named Paraves. [1] Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. For more than a century, the small theropod dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica from the Late Jurassic period was considered to have been the earliest bird.
Here's a riddle: how did an order of flightless birds manage to spread to places they would have had to fly to? Rheas live in South America, cassowaries and emus in Australia, kiwis in New Zealand ...
A turning point came in the early twentieth century with the writings of Gerhard Heilmann of Denmark.An artist by trade, Heilmann had a scholarly interest in birds and from 1913 to 1916, expanding on earlier work by Othenio Abel, [12] published the results of his research in several parts, dealing with the anatomy, embryology, behavior, paleontology, and evolution of birds. [13]
Each order of dinosaur has slightly differing pelvis bones providing evidence of common descent. Additionally, modern birds show a similarity to ancient saurischian pelvic structures indicating the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. This can also be seen in Figure 5c as the Aves branch off the Theropoda suborder.