PhD: Building a Fossil Insect Phylogeny

Insects alone constitute more than half of all described species. They are ubiquitous: present in, and integral to, all known terrestrial ecosystems. As pollinators, pests, and vectors of disease, they impact on myriad aspects of human culture and activities. In recent years phylogenomic work has provided a backbone tree for the majority of extant insect orders (Misof et al. 2014). The insects have a rich fossil record (e.g. Figure 1), and there are, numerous orders with no living representatives, which have yet to be placed within the evolutionary tree of the insects. The aim of this project is to create cladistic dataset that will allow these orders to be placed within the insect tree. This has the potential to answer key questions in insect evolution, and will be used as a tool to identify patterns in the evolution of this hypediverse group, and use them as a model group for studying broader evolutionary topics.