150 Million Years Of Fish Evolution In One Handy Figure

Have you ever wished you could have the entire 150 million years of spiny-rayed fish evolution in convenient poster form? You can see how all the spiny-finned fish - more than 18,000 species of them, which represent nearly one-third of living vertebrates - are related to one another.

To accomplish this, the scientists inferred the relationships from the sequences of 10 genes from 520 spiny-rayed fin fish representing most of their families. They combined this data with that of 37 fossil 'age constraints' used as reality checks on the actual timing of evolutionary shifts.