Flatworm - Classification and Evolutionary Relationships

Classification and Evolutionary Relationships

The oldest known platyhelminth specimen is a fossil preserved in Eocene age baltic amber and placed in the monotypic species Palaeosoma balticus, while the oldest subfossil specimens are schistosome eggs discovered in ancient Egyptian mummies. The Platyhelminthes have very few synapomorphies, distinguishing features that all Platyhelminthes and no other animals have. This makes it difficult to work out both their relationships with other groups of animals and the relationships between different groups that are described as members of the Platyhelminthes.

The "traditional" view before the 1990s was that Platyhelminthes formed the sister group to all the other bilaterians, which include, for example, arthropods, molluscs, annelids and chordates. Since then molecular phylogenetics, which aims to work out evolutionary "family trees" by comparing different organisms' biochemicals such as DNA, RNA and proteins, has radically changed scientists' view of evolutionary relationships between animals. Detailed morphological analyses of anatomical features in the mid-1980s and molecular phylogenetics analyses since 2000 using different sections of DNA agree that Acoelomorpha, consisting of Acoela (traditionally regarded as very simple "turbellarians") and Nemertodermatida (another small group previously classified as "turbellarians") are the sister group to all other bilaterians, including the rest of the Platyhelminthes. However, a 2007 study concluded Acoela and Nemertodermatida were two distinct groups of bilaterians, although it agreed both are more closely related to cnidarians (jellyfish, etc.) than other bilaterians are.

Xenoturbella, a bilaterian with whose only well-defined organ is a statocyst, was originally classified as a "primitive turbellarian". However, it has recently been reclassified as a deuterostome.

The Platyhelminthes excluding Acoelomorpha contain two main groups, Catenulida and Rhabditophora, and both are generally agreed to be monophyletic (each contains all and only the descendants of an ancestor which is a member of the same group). Early molecular phylogenetics analyses of the Catenulida and Rhabditophora left uncertainties about whether these could be combined in a single monophyletic group, but a study in 2008 concluded they could, therefore Platyhelminthes could be redefined as Catenulida plus Rhabditophora, excluding the Acoelomorpha.

Other molecular phylogenetics analyses agree the redefined Platyhelminthes are most closely related to Gastrotricha, and both are part of a grouping known as Platyzoa. Platyzoa are generally agreed to be at least closely related to the Lophotrochozoa, a superphylum that includes molluscs and annelid worms. The majority view is that Platyzoa are part of Lophotrochozoa, but a significant minority of researchers regard Platyzoa as a sister group of Lophotrochozoa.

It has been agreed since 1985 that each of the wholly parasitic platyhelminth groups (Cestoda, Monogenea and Trematoda) is monophyletic, and that together these form a larger monophyletic grouping, the Neodermata, in which the adults of all members have syncitial skins. However there is debate about whether the Cestoda and Monogenea can be combined as an intermediate monophyletic group, the Cercomeromorpha, within the Neodermata. It is generally agreed that the Neodermata are a sub-group a few levels down in the "family tree" of the Rhabditophora. Hence the traditional sub-phylum "Turbellaria" is paraphyletic, since it does not include the Neodermata although these are descendants of a sub-group of "turbellarians".