Living vertebrates are the fourth most species-rich clade of animals. Nearly half of all vertebrate species are ray-finned fishes, Actinopterygii. Our lab works to produce hypotheses of evolutionary relationships, or phylogenies, of Actinopterygii. In 2012, the lab published the first large fossil-calibrated molecular phylogeny using multiple Sanger-sequenced nuclear genes of all major lineages of ray-finned fishes. This effort set the stage for over a decade of research on the deep-time evolution of vertebrates. Recently, we have helped demonstrate the utility of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) for resolving the phylogenetics of ray-finned fishes at disparate scales of divergences. PI Near is also leading the effort to establish an explicitly phylogenetic and rank-free taxonomy of ray-finned fishes. Along with a constellation of collaborators, our research group is currently working on several
studies that integrate genomes and fossils to uncover the evolutionary histories of major clades of ray-finned fishes.