Ancient wings unfurled: Computer simulation reconstructs extinct butterfly patterns.

John Shuey jshuey at TNC.ORG
Thu Oct 30 11:17:46 EST 2003


This is pretty interesting.  If you play with it a little - you can quickly
figure out a couple of things.  First it seems to be based on average
conditions - so the ancestral condition always moves to a middle-ground
phenotype.  Second it is definitely not a cladistic simulation - if you look
at the three-species clade of auriculdus+ henia+ mandanes, you will note
that they all have a shared synapomrphy of two "lost eye-spots".  Amazingly,
these lost eyespots re-appear in all the common ancestors within the clade -
the model implies that the loss of the character within the clade happened
independently three times in recent times - instead of the parsimonious
solution which would be once in the common ancestor.

Maybe I should get to work.

John

_________________
John Shuey
Director of Conservation Science
Indiana Office of The Nature Conservancy



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-leps-l at lists.yale.edu [mailto:owner-leps-l at lists.yale.edu]On
Behalf Of peterlep28 at yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 6:14 PM
To: LEPS-L at lists.yale.edu
Subject: Ancient wings unfurled: Computer simulation reconstructs
extinct butterfly patterns.


Your friend peterlep28 at yahoo.com has sent you the following link from
Nature Science Update (http://www.nature.com/nsu):

Ancient wings unfurled: Computer simulation reconstructs extinct butterfly
patterns.

The address is:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/031020/031020-11.html

Their message:
An article from the 10/27/03 issue of "Nature" that may be of interest.
Hope this works, I'm trying to forward the article from their website.

Mike Leski




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