Restructuring higher taxonomy using broad-scale phylogenomics: the living Ophiuroidea

The power and throughput of next-generation sequencing is instigating a major transformation in our understanding of evolution and classification of life on our planet. The new trees of life are robust and comprehensive. Here we provide a landmark phylogeny of the living ophiuroids and use it as the basis for a major revision of the higher classification of this class of marine invertebrates. We used an exon-capture system to generate a 1484 exon (273 kbp) data-matrix from DNA extracted from ethanol-preserved museum samples. We successfully obtained an average of 90% of our target sequence from 576 species spread across the known taxonomic diversity. The topology of the major lineages was robust to taxon sampling, exon-sampling, models and methods. However, estimates of node age were much less precise, varying by about a quarter of mean age. We used a combination of phylogenetic distinctiveness and temporal-banding to guide our revision of the family-level classification. Empirically, w...