BioScience Magazine
BioScience Current Issue
The October 2008 Issue of BioScience
- Vol. 58, No. 9 -
Organisms from Molecules to the Environment
Publishing 11 times a year. ISSN 0006-3568.
Cover:A scanning electron micrograph reveals fine details of an exceptionally well-preserved “Orsten-type” fossil of larval developmental stage 1 of Yicaris dienensis, a newly discovered crustacean from the upper Lower Cambrian of Yunnan, China (about 520 million years ago). The larva is 245 micrometers in length. Aspects of the limb morphology and other details of the species (described by Xi-guang Zhang, David J. Siveter, Dieter Waloszek, and Andreas Maas in Nature, vol. 449, pp. 595–598) allow it to be identified as a crown-group crustacean, or eucrustacean, making it the earliest known member of the clade that includes living crustaceans. The discovery sheds significant light on the nature and timing of the so-called Cambrian explosion, the apparently sudden appearance of most modern animal phyla in the fossil record around 530 million years ago. In particular, Yicaris suggests that the evolutionary split that gave rise to arthropods occurred before the start of the Cambrian. In the Teaching Biology article that starts on p. 855, Jeffrey S. Levinton provides an informal account of current efforts to reconcile conflicting paleontological and molecular evidence about the “explosion,” which, although a remarkable radiation, may have been less sudden than was once thought. Image courtesy of David J. Siveter, reproduced by permission of Nature.
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