More than half of all known animal species are insects, yet the evolutionary history of one of their major groups—Polyneoptera—remains largely unsolved. This project tackles a fundamental gap in our understanding of how winged insects first evolved and diversified. Polyneoptera includes familiar insects like cockroaches, grasshoppers, and earwigs, but scientists disagree on how these groups are related, when they lost or gained the ability to fly, and why some lineages became so species-rich while others did not. The researcher will combine new fossils from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou locality in China with DNA data from living species—an approach never before applied to this group—to build a robust evolutionary tree and timescale. The work is fundamental science. It will not produce a new material, drug, or device. But understanding how insects became the dominant animals on land has deep implications for fields from agriculture to conservation. Past fundamental research on insect evolution has informed pest control strategies, pollination management, and even bio-inspired engineering. A clearer picture of Polyneoptera’s past could eventually help predict how insect communities respond to climate change, or reveal why certain lineages—like the ice crawlers (Grylloblattodea)—survive only in narrow environmental niches.
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Insects constitute more than half of all documented animal species, and the only group of flying invertebrates. Polyneoptera represents one of the major lineages of winged insects with unsolved evolutionary history, and the first lineage of winged insects that underwent an evolutionary radiation. Open questions in Polyneoptera evolution include their phylogenetic relationships, patterns of wing evolution (origin and secondary loss of flying abilities), and how the origin of fly relate with patterns of polyneopteran diversification and species richness. These issues have profound implications for our understanding of the early evolution of winged insects more broadly. This project will use, for the first time, a combined morphological and phylogenomic approach, and integrate new fossils and living taxa to achieve a holistic understanding of polyneopteran evolution. We will explicitly focus on two orders that are particularly poorly understood: Plecoptera and Grylloblattodea, to clarifying the relationship close to the root of the polyneopteran tree, particularly the relationships of the Zoraptera, Dermaptera and Plecoptera. We will infer a new evolutionary timescale of Polyneoptera using new fossil calibrations defined using Middle Jurassic fossils from the Daohugou locality I already sampled, and that I will describe as part of this project. Subsequently, using new fossils and existing data I will compile a morphological dataset, and using publicly available data a new phylogenomic dataset. I will resolve the phylogeny of Polyneoptera, date it and use the new morphological matrix to understand patterns of morphological evolution in this lineage. Finally, I will perform diversification analyses to discriminate how extrinsic (e.g. climate and environmental changes) and intrinsic (e.g. origin of wings) factors shaped polyneopteran evolution and contributed to their current biodiversity.
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