Evolutionary origin of the Scombridae (tunas and mackerels): members of a paleogene adaptive radiation with 14 other pelagic fish families.

ABSTRACT: Uncertainties surrounding the evolutionary origin of the epipelagic fish family Scombridae (tunas and mackerels) are symptomatic of the difficulties in resolving suprafamilial relationships within Percomorpha, a hyperdiverse teleost radiation that contains approximately 17,000 species placed in 13 ill-defined orders and 269 families. Here we find that scombrids share a common ancestry with 14 families based on (i) bioinformatic analyses using partial mitochondrial and nuclear gene sequences from all percomorphs deposited in GenBank (10,733 sequences) and (ii) subsequent mitogenomic analysis based on 57 species from those targeted 15 families and 67 outgroup taxa. Morphological heterogeneity among these 15 families is so extraordinary that they have been placed in six different perciform su

SUBMITTER: Miya M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3762723 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature