Alejandro Izquierdo López

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The diversity of cephalic morphologies in mandibulates (myriapods and pancrustaceans) was key to their evolutionary success. A group of Cambrian bivalved arthropods called hymenocarines exhibit diagnostic mandibulate traits that illustrate this diversity, but many forms are still poorly known. These include the odaraiids, typified by Odaraia alata...

Mantodea (praying mantises) is a group of exclusively predatory insects, which, together with nonraptorial blattodeans (cockroaches and termites) and groups exclusively found in the fossil record, form the group Dictyoptera. A central characteristic of Mantodea is the specialization of their first pair of legs as raptorial grasping appendages, but...

Discovered over a century ago, the lower Cambrian (Series 2, Stage 4) Cranbrook Lagerstätte of southeastern British Columbia's Eager Formation is one of the oldest Burgess Shale-type deposits in North America. This Konservat-Lagerstätte is rich in olenelloid trilobites, but also yields a very low-diversity soft-bodied fossil assemblage including Tu...

The origin of mandibulates, the hyperdiverse arthropod group that includes pancrustaceans and myriapods, dates back to the Cambrian. Bivalved arthropod groups such as hymenocarines have been argued to be early mandibulates, but many species are still poorly known, and their affinities remain uncertain. One of the most common and globally distribute...

The origin of mandibulate arthropods can be traced back to the Cambrian period to several carapace-bearing arthropod groups, but their morphological diversity is still not well characterized. Here, we describe Balhuticaris voltae, a bivalved arthropod from the 506-million-year-old Burgess Shale (Marble Canyon, British Columbia, Canada). This specie...

Ordovician open marine Lagerstätten are relatively rare and widely dispersed, producing a patchy picture of the diversity and biogeography of nonmineralized marine organisms and challenging our understanding of the fate of Cambrian groups. Here, for the first time, we report soft-bodied fossils, including a well-preserved marrellomorph arthropod, f...

Cambrian bivalved arthropods are a polyphyletic group of carapace-bearing arthropods that includes stem euarthropods, stem mandibulates and crustaceans. Here, we describe Pakucaris apatis gen. et sp. nov., a new stem mandibulate bivalved arthropod from the middle Cambrian (Wuliuan Stage) Burgess Shale (Marble Canyon, Kootenay National Park, British...

The loss of biodiversity represents a major global crisis which calls for the need of strong conservation efforts. Most of these efforts are currently being led by research groups, NGOs, educational institutions and governmental action, but in the last decades a new way of approaching conservation, namely citizen science, has become increasingly co...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.191350.].

The application of scientific names is determined by means of nomenclatural types, and every name has to be typified properly. The concept has limitations for unicellular organisms, because original material frequently consists of drawings and/or inadequately preserved physical material. Peridinium cinctum is an abundant freshwater microalga and va...

The origin of the arthropod carapace, an enlargement of cephalic tergites, can be traced back to the Cambrian period. However, its disparity and evolution are still not fully understood. Here, we describe a new 'bivalved' arthropod, Fibulacaris nereidis gen. et sp. nov., based on 102 specimens from the middle Cambrian (Wuliuan Stage) Burgess Shale,...

To study zooplankton–phytoplankton relationships in the diatom-dominated plankton communities of the northern Adriatic we performed feeding experiments with diatoms and zoea I larvae of the brachyuran Xantho poressa. We found that zoea I of X. poressa feed on diatoms of different forms (centric, pennate, colony forming, single celled, with or witho...

Peridinium cinctum is a common freshwater dinophyte with a long history of research. Erich Lindemann was the first to assess intraspecific variability in this species focusing on plate pattern variation. Since then, this issue has been neglected but with the application of DNA sequence diagnostics, a combination of morphological and molecular chara...