The main goal of the project was to test a longstanding idea in evolutionary biology that has anecdotal support but which had never been rigorously evaluated, Rabosky said. U-M computational evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith is a co-author. Rabosky and Michael Alfaro of the University of California, Los Angeles, are the lead authors. Photo courtesy of Michigan Sea Grant.The study’s findings were published online June 6 in Nature Communications. The evolutionary relationships between nearly 8,000 species of fish are delineated in the branches of the tree, allowing the researchers to make inferences about all 30,000 or so species of ray-finned fish.Ī lake trout from the Great Lakes. The work involved assembling one of the largest evolutionary trees ever created for any group of animals. The sturgeon finding is just one result in a wide-ranging study of the rates of species formation and anatomical change in fish. There are dwarf sturgeon the size of a bass and several other species that are nearly as big as a Volkswagen.” They have evolved a huge range of body sizes.

Photo courtesy of Michigan Sea Grant.“Our study shows that sturgeon are evolving very quickly in some ways. But that’s simply not true,” said Daniel Rabosky, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator of herpetology at the Museum of Zoology.Ī spotted gar from the Great Lakes. “Sturgeon are thought of as a living fossil group that has undergone relatively slow rates of anatomical change over time. Photo courtesy of Michigan Sea Grant.ANN ARBOR-Efforts to restore sturgeon in the Great Lakes region have received a lot of attention in recent years, and many of the news stories note that the prehistoric-looking fish are “living fossils” virtually unchanged for millions of years.īut a new study by University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues reveals that in at least one measure of evolutionary change-changes in body size over time-sturgeon have been one of the fastest-evolving fish on the planet.

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