FORT LAUDERDALE-DAVIE, Fla. – Pop Quiz: what creatures make up more than 70% of the approximately 1.9 million described species on earth and have long served as model organisms in many areas of biology? If you guessed invertebrates, you’re right!

Recordings from the Third Annual Spring Symposium, Genome-scale Phylogenetics, hosted by NMNH’s Frontiers in Phylogenetics Program 

Elizabeth Pennisi has written an article about the SICB symposium organized by Todd Oakley and former lab member Jeanne Serb, now a professor at Iowa State University. The article highlights recent findings from our lab and other labs, showing that several animals showing that opsins are used not only in eyes, but in other contexts as well. Our lab is working on extraocular photoreceptors in Cnidaria, Cephalopoda, and Polyplacophora.

 What good is half an eye? Evolutionary biologists studying the origins of vision get that question a lot, and new research out of UC Santa Barbara points to a possible answer. Findings appearing today in the journal BMC Biology indicate that, even in the absence of eyes altogether, some creatures display a light-sensitivity that uses the same visual pathway that allows humans to see.