Meeting Abstract
How often—across all 30,000+ species of teleost fishes—were pectoral and pelvic fins lost? Are they ever regained? Surveying the literature for information about the taxonomic distribution of any morphological feature is a laborious and time-consuming manual task. We show that tagging anatomy with computer-readable terms automates this process, enabling rapid views of integrated data, and extending author observations to include inferred data. We compiled an extensive literature-based character survey of paired fin loss across extant teleost fishes, and demonstrate that paired fin data can be automatically extracted as a matrix from anatomical data that has been “tagged” with computer-readable terms in the Phenoscape Knowledgebase (kb.phenoscape.org). Using an automated bioinformatic approach to infer and propagate our data, we are able to extend our knowledge from what was previously documented in the literature. We have created computational methods that allow us to merge these data with a species-level tree for all teleosts from the OpenTree of Life, a difficult challenge at this scale, which enabled us to document the evolutionary gain and loss of paired fins. Broad-scale phylogenetic mapping of morphological traits across all extant fishes has rarely been done, but it can be a helpful research tool for future studies. Applying semantic logic to produce new inferences of anatomical parts in a phylogenetic context can increase our ability for data integration and comparative studies. In addition, morphological data with its links to genetics has the potential to offer powerful insights into the evolutionary process.
