Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access published June 23, 2010 Integrative and Comparative Biology, pp. 1–20 doi:10.1093/icb/icq074 SYMPOSIUM Evolutionary Relationships Among Scyphozoan Jellyfish Families Based on Complete Taxon Sampling and Phylogenetic Analyses of 18S and 28S Ribosomal DNA Downloaded from Keith M. Bayha,*,1 Michael N Dawson,2,* Allen G. Collins,† Marcos S. Barbeitos‡ and Steven H. D. Haddock§ *School of Natural Sciences, University of California at Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA; †National Systematics Laboratory of NOAA’s Fisheries Service, National Museum of Natural History, MRC-153, Smithsonian Institution, PO Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA; ‡University of Kansas, Department of http://icb.oxfordjournals.org Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Haworth Hall, 1200 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, KS 66045-7566, USA and §Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, 7700 Sandholdt Road, Moss Landing, CA 95039, USA From the symposium ‘‘Assembling the Cnidarian Tree of Life’’ presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 3–7, 2010, at Seattle, Washington. 1Present address: Dauphin Island Sea Lab, 101 Bienville Blvd, Dauphin Island, AL 36528 USA 2E-mail:
[email protected] at Smithsonian Institution Libraries on June 24, 2010 Synopsis A stable phylogenetic hypothesis for families within jellyfish class Scyphozoa has been elusive. Reasons for the lack of resolution of scyphozoan familial relationships include a dearth of morphological characters that reliably distin- guish taxa and incomplete taxonomic sampling in molecular studies. Here, we address the latter issue by using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships among all 19 currently valid scyphozoan families, using sequence data from two nuclear genes: 18S and 28S rDNA.