Exploring Anglerfish: From Skull Morphology to Family Trees

There are over 200 species of deep-sea anglerfish; some are long and thin, some are squat and round, some have fins that they use to "walk" along the sea floor, and others have huge eyes set far back into their heads. But how did all this morphological diversity first come to be? Thanks to a new anglerfish family tree, now we know.

Scientists built this evolutionary tree using genetic information from hundreds of samples and anglerfish specimens across the globe. It indicates that anglerfish originated from an ancestor that crawled along the seafloor ... and sheds new light on how experts could think about biodiversity as a whole.

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