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Born a worm, reject notochord, progress to crab, ascend to beetle 🪲 Works as a meme and a pretty accurate summary of invert evolution and dominance through the eons :bugged:

Also fucking dino nerds stole this paper's spotlight cause of that new Spinosaurus discovery :catmad

Aight I re-read the paper twice today and this has some MAJOR applications... All beetles descended from an aquatic ancestor a lot earlier than believed, way back in the early Carboniferous Beetles diversified before we all thought for NOW unknown reasons as the previous assumption was that the rise of flowering plants gave rise to their diversification, now we see evidence they exploded suddenly before even that for no obvious reason other than to flex on all other life :skully Scarab beetles (this includes stag and rhinoceros beetles) are grouped together with rove beetles! Burying beetles are in essence rove beetles now :catskully Beetles were never majorly affected by any mass extinction since they arrived on the scene... At least on family level We got no fucking idea what makes beetles in particular so prolific now that it turns out it might not be a single or a few key adaptations like vegetation consumption and the evolution of their elytra... 🪲

Using a previously published and carefully curated 68-gene dataset, the scientists ran a battery of mathematical models to reconstruct the evolution of protein sequences—the results of which, have been published today in Royal Society Open Science. After a year and a half of running on a...