Evolutionary innovation accelerates morphological diversification in pufferfishes and their relatives.

Evolutionary innovations have played an important role in shaping the diversity of life on Earth. However, how these innovations arise and their downstream effects on patterns of morphological diversification remain poorly understood. Here, we examine the impact of evolutionary innovation on trait diversification in tetraodontiform fishes (pufferfishes, boxfishes, ocean sunfishes, and allies).

Fossils indicate marine dispersal in osteoglossid fishes, a classic example of continental vicariance.

The separation of closely related terrestrial or freshwater species by vast marine barriers represents a biogeographical riddle. Such cases can provide evidence for vicariance, a process whereby ancient geological events like continental rifting divided ancestral geographical ranges. With an evolutionary history extending tens of millions of years, freshwater ecology, and distribution encompassing widely separated southern landmasses, osteoglossid bonytongue fishes are a textbook case of vicariance attributed to Mesozoic fragmentation of the Gondwanan supercontinent.

Mad Honey Ingestion Leading to Grayanotoxin Poisoning During the Burning Man Music Festival: A Case Series.

This is a case series of three patients who presented to the medical facilities at Burning Man, an annual week-long gathering in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, for recreational grayanotoxin ingestion. Grayanotoxin, also known as "mad honey," caused the patients to present with varying degrees of dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea based on the quantity ingested. Vital signs showed significant bradycardia and hypotension and were successfully treated with atropine and intravenous fluids.

Soft-tissue fossilization illuminates the stepwise evolution of the ray-finned fish brain.

A complex brain is central to the success of backboned animals. However, direct evidence bearing on vertebrate brain evolution comes almost exclusively from extant species, leaving substantial knowledge gaps. Although rare, soft-tissue preservation in fossils can yield unique insights on patterns of neuroanatomical evolution.

The first articulated skeletons of enigmatic Late Cretaceous billfish-like actinopterygians.

Only few candidates of Mesozoic fishes with a similar body plan and ecological niche to the modern billfishes are suggested as their analogues. Several specimens were recovered from Cenomanian deposits in Germany and Lebanon and display a billfish-like fusiform body with elongated premaxillae. They are found close to the plethodids and show a unique combination of characters (rostrum pointed and extremely elongated, double articular head of the quadrate, anteroposteriorly elongated abdominal centra indicating a slender body and different types of scales on the body) allowing their inclusion in a new genus.

Bony-fish-like scales in a Silurian maxillate placoderm.

Major groups of jawed vertebrates exhibit contrasting conditions of dermal plates and scales. But the transition between these conditions remains unclear due to rare information on taxa occupying key phylogenetic positions. The 425-million-year-old fish Entelognathus combines an unusual mosaic of characters typically associated with jawed stem gnathostomes or crown gnathostomes.

Fossil evidence for a pharyngeal origin of the vertebrate pectoral girdle.

The origin of vertebrate paired appendages is one of the most investigated and debated examples of evolutionary novelty. Paired appendages are widely considered as key innovations that enabled new opportunities for controlled swimming and gill ventilation and were prerequisites for the eventual transition from water to land. The past 150 years of debate has been shaped by two contentious theories: the ventrolateral fin-fold hypothesis and the archipterygium hypothesis.

How to tuna fish: constraint, convergence, and integration in the neurocranium of pelagiarian fishes.

Morphological evolution of the vertebrate skull has been explored across a wide range of tetrapod clades using geometric morphometrics, but the application of these methods to teleost fishes, accounting for roughly half of all vertebrate species, has been limited. Here we present the results of a study investigating 3D morphological evolution of the neurocranium across 114 species of Pelagiaria, a diverse clade of open-ocean teleost fishes that includes tuna and mackerel. Despite showing high shape disparity overall, taxa from all families fall into three distinct morphological clusters.

Nebulized Ketamine Used for Managing Ankle Fracture in the Prehospital Emergency Setting: A Case Report.

Introduction: Acute traumatic limb injury is a common complaint of patients presenting to the emergency department (ED). Ketamine is an effective analgesic administered via intravenous (IV), intranasal (IN), intramuscular (IM), and nebulized routes in the ED. It has also been used in the prehospital setting via IV, IM, and IN routes.

Exceptional fossil preservation and evolution of the ray-finned fish brain.

Brain anatomy provides key evidence for the relationships between ray-finned fishes, but two major limitations obscure our understanding of neuroanatomical evolution in this major vertebrate group. First, the deepest branching living lineages are separated from the group's common ancestor by hundreds of millions of years, with indications that aspects of their brain morphology-like other aspects of their anatomy-are specialized relative to primitive conditions. Second, there are no direct constraints on brain morphology in the earliest ray-finned fishes beyond the coarse picture provided by cranial endocasts: natural or virtual infillings of void spaces within the skull.

DiceCT for fishes: recommendations for pairing iodine contrast agents with μCT to visualize soft tissues in fishes.

Computed tomography (CT) scanning and other high-throughput three-dimensional (3D) visualization tools are transforming the ways we study morphology, ecology and evolutionary biology research beyond generating vast digital repositories of anatomical data. Contrast-enhanced chemical staining methods, which render soft tissues radio-opaque when coupled with CT scanning, encompass several approaches that are growing in popularity and versatility. Of these, the various diceCT techniques that use an iodine-based solution like Lugol's have provided access to an array of morphological data sets spanning extant vertebrate lineages.

Phylogenomics of the Ancient and Species-Depauperate Gars Tracks 150 Million Years of Continental Fragmentation in the Northern Hemisphere.

Reconstructing deep-time biogeographic histories is limited by the comparatively recent diversification of most extant lineages. Ray-finned fishes, which include nearly half of all living vertebrates, are no exception. Although most lineages of ray-finned fishes radiated around the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, a handful of ancient, species-poor clades still persist.

A Late Devonian actinopterygian suggests high lineage survivorship across the end-Devonian mass extinction.

Many accounts of the early history of actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes) posit that the end-Devonian mass extinction had a major influence on their evolution. Existing phylogenies suggest this episode could have acted as a bottleneck, paring the early diversity of the group to a handful of survivors. This picture, coupled with increases in taxonomic and morphological diversity in the Carboniferous, contributes to a model of explosive post-extinction radiation.

Perceptions and Barriers to Administering Vasopressors in the Prehospital Setting.

Introduction Vasopressor administration is a critical medical intervention for patients with hypotension in undifferentiated shock states. Over the years, prehospital care has advanced with protocols and training that allow paramedics in the field to administer a variety of vasopressors. The primary objective of this investigation was to evaluate vasopressor experience among paramedics with regard to preference as well as the barriers to its preparation and administration.

Recreational drug toxicity with severe hyperthermia: Rapid onsite treatment and clinical course.

Electronic dance music festivals have gained notoriety in the critical care and emergency medicine fields due to an alarming incidence of hospitalizations and deaths related to the high prevalence of recreational drug use. Recreational drug use toxicity, in part related to sympathomimetic toxidromes, may cause hyponatremia, seizures, rhabdomyolysis, hyperkalemia, acidosis, coagulopathy, circulatory shock, multi-organ failure, and even death. This wide-ranging syndrome has been referred to as psychostimulant drug-induced toxicity.

Prolonged morphological expansion of spiny-rayed fishes following the end-Cretaceous.

Spiny-rayed fishes (Acanthomorpha) dominate modern marine habitats and account for more than a quarter of all living vertebrate species. Previous time-calibrated phylogenies and patterns from the fossil record explain this dominance by correlating the origin of major acanthomorph lineages with the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction. Here we infer a time-calibrated phylogeny using ultraconserved elements that samples 91.

A Permian fish reveals widespread distribution of neopterygian-like jaw suspension.

The actinopterygian crown group (comprising all living ray-finned fishes) originated by the end of the Carboniferous. However, most late Paleozoic taxa are stem actinopterygians, and broadly resemble stratigraphically older taxa. The early Permian † is notable for its three-dimensional preservation and past phylogenetic interpretations as a nested member of the neopterygian crown.

The rapid evolution of lungfish durophagy.

Innovations relating to the consumption of hard prey are implicated in ecological shifts in marine ecosystems as early as the mid-Paleozoic. Lungfishes represent the first and longest-ranging lineage of durophagous vertebrates, but how and when the various feeding specializations of this group arose remain unclear. Two exceptionally preserved fossils of the Early Devonian lobe-finned fish Youngolepis reveal the origin of the specialized lungfish feeding mechanism.

Fossilized cell structures identify an ancient origin for the teleost whole-genome duplication.

Teleost fishes comprise one-half of all vertebrate species and possess a duplicated genome. This whole-genome duplication (WGD) occurred on the teleost stem lineage in an ancient common ancestor of all living teleosts and is hypothesized as a trigger of their exceptional evolutionary radiation. Genomic and phylogenetic data indicate that WGD occurred in the Mesozoic after the divergence of teleosts from their closest living relatives but before the origin of the extant teleost groups.

Integration drives rapid phenotypic evolution in flatfishes.

Evolutionary innovations are scattered throughout the tree of life, and have allowed the organisms that possess them to occupy novel adaptive zones. While the impacts of these innovations are well documented, much less is known about how these innovations arise in the first place. Patterns of covariation among traits across macroevolutionary time can offer insights into the generation of innovation.