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      Cretophengodidae, a new Cretaceous beetle family, sheds light on the evolution of bioluminescence

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          Abstract

          Bioluminescent beetles of the superfamily Elateroidea (fireflies, fire beetles, glow-worms) are the most speciose group of terrestrial light-producing animals. The evolution of bioluminescence in elateroids is associated with unusual morphological modifications, such as soft-bodiedness and neoteny, but the fragmentary nature of the fossil record discloses little about the origin of these adaptations. We report the discovery of a new bioluminescent elateroid beetle family from the mid-Cretaceous of northern Myanmar ( ca 99 Ma), Cretophengodidae fam. nov. Cretophengodes azari gen. et sp. nov. belongs to the bioluminescent lampyroid clade, and would appear to represent a transitional fossil linking the soft-bodied Phengodidae + Rhagophthalmidae clade and hard-bodied elateroids. The fossil male possesses a light organ on the abdomen which presumably served a defensive function, documenting a Cretaceous radiation of bioluminescent beetles coinciding with the diversification of major insectivore groups such as frogs and stem-group birds. The discovery adds a key branch to the elateroid tree of life and sheds light on the evolution of soft-bodiedness and the historical biogeography of elateroid beetles.

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          Age constraint on Burmese amber based on U–Pb dating of zircons

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            The evolution and genomic basis of beetle diversity

            Significance We inferred the phylogeny and evolution of beetles using genomic data of an unprecedented scale. Moreover, we documented the diversification of plant-feeding (herbivorous) beetles, which account for nearly half of all beetle species and a similar proportion of herbivorous insects, following convergent horizontal transfers of bacterial and fungal genes enabling the digestion of lignocellulose in plant cell walls. Our findings clarify beetle phylogenetic relationships and reveal new insights into the evolution of specialized herbivory and why there are so many species of beetles. Furthermore, they underscore the intimacy and complexity of the evolutionary relationships between insects, plants, and microorganisms and show how analyses of large-scale genomic data are revealing the evolution and genomic basis of insect biodiversity.
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              Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution.

              The observed diversity of dinosaurs reached its highest peak during the mid- and Late Cretaceous, the 50 Myr that preceded their extinction, and yet this explosion of dinosaur diversity may be explained largely by sampling bias. It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR), from 125-80 Myr ago, when flowering plants, herbivorous and social insects, squamates, birds and mammals all underwent a rapid expansion. Although an apparent explosion of dinosaur diversity occurred in the mid-Cretaceous, coinciding with the emergence of new groups (e.g. neoceratopsians, ankylosaurid ankylosaurs, hadrosaurids and pachycephalosaurs), results from the first quantitative study of diversification applied to a new supertree of dinosaurs show that this apparent burst in dinosaurian diversity in the last 18 Myr of the Cretaceous is a sampling artefact. Indeed, major diversification shifts occurred largely in the first one-third of the group's history. Despite the appearance of new clades of medium to large herbivores and carnivores later in dinosaur history, these new originations do not correspond to significant diversification shifts. Instead, the overall geometry of the Cretaceous part of the dinosaur tree does not depart from the null hypothesis of an equal rates model of lineage branching. Furthermore, we conclude that dinosaurs did not experience a progressive decline at the end of the Cretaceous, nor was their evolution driven directly by the KTR.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                Proc. R. Soc. B.
                The Royal Society
                0962-8452
                1471-2954
                January 27 2021
                January 20 2021
                January 27 2021
                : 288
                : 1943
                : 20202730
                Affiliations
                [1 ]State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and Centre for Excellence in Life and Palaeoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, People's Republic of China
                [2 ]School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China
                [3 ]Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Palacký University, 77900 Olomouc, Czech Republic
                [4 ]School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Life Sciences Building, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TQ, UK
                [5 ]State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People's Republic of China
                [6 ]Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO National Research Collections Australia, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia
                Article
                10.1098/rspb.2020.2730
                2eac9e06-b464-42be-8a63-2131188d6616
                © 2021

                https://royalsociety.org/-/media/journals/author/Licence-to-Publish-20062019-final.pdf

                https://royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/

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