Symposium: From small and squishy to big and armored: Genomic, ecological and paleontological insights into the early evolution of animals

The origin of animals and their early evolutionary history—culminating in the Cambrian ‘explosion’ when essentially all animal phyla appear in the fossil record within the geologically short span of ~20 million years—is one of the most exciting interdisciplinary topics in the biological sciences. Understanding why and how animals made the transition to multicellularity in the Tonian (~800 million years ago), and then suddenly appeared in the fossil record ~540 million years ago at the base of the Cambrian requires insights from phylogenetics, comparative genomics and morphology, evolutionary developmental biology, ecology, paleontology, and geochemistry. This symposium will explore these interdisciplinary questions with talks by experts in diverse fields from all over the world.

Sponsors: DEDB, DEE, DIZ, DPCB, AMS

 

Organizers

• Erik Sperling, esper@stanford.edu
• Kevin Kocot, kmkocot@ua.edu

Speakers

S1-1 Thursday, Jan. 4, 07:55 SPERLING, Erik A.*; KOCOT, Kevin M.:

Introduction

S1-2 Thursday, Jan. 4, 08:00 LAUMER, CE:

Apologies and prospects for metazoan phylogenetics in the genomic era

S1-3 Thursday, Jan. 4, 08:30 SPERLING, EA*; SGP COLLABORATIVE TEAM, _:

The Temporal and Environmental Context of Early Animal Evolution

S1-4 Thursday, Jan. 4, 09:00 FERNANDEZ-VALVERDE, Selene L.*; DEGNAN, Bernard M.:

Early evolution of gene regulatory networks in metazoan development.

S1-5 Thursday, Jan. 4, 09:30 BUTTERFIELD, NJ:

Pumping, Swimming and Visual Predation – a Fluid Dynamic View of Early Metazoan Evolution

S1-6 Thursday, Jan. 4, 10:30 LEYS, SP*; KAHN, AS; YAHEL, G; BANNISTER, RJ:

Oxygen requirements of sponges and the origin of multicellular animals

S1-7 Thursday, Jan. 4, 11:00 GOLD, DA:

The evolution and adaptation of jellyfish in Precambrian oceans

S1-8 Thursday, Jan. 4, 11:30 RYAN, JF*; HERNANDEZ, AM; SCHULTZ, DT; FRANCIS, WR; KOREN, S; SCHNITZLER, CE; MARTINDALE, MQ:

Revisiting gene content to resolve the phylogenetic position of ctenophores and sponges

S1-9 Thursday, Jan. 4, 13:30 TARHAN, LG*; DROSER, ML; GEHLING, JG:

Ecological Innovation in the Late Ediacaran

S1-10 Thursday, Jan. 4, 14:00 PAPS, J:

Reconstructing The Genome Of The First Animal: The Impact Of Novelty In The Origins Of Metazoans

S1-11 Thursday, Jan. 4, 14:30 CARON, Jean-Bernard:

The Origin of Phyla—Insights From the Burgess Shale

Complementary Session: Session 112, Session 124