The “kingdoms” of eukaryotes are plants, animals and fungi, right?

Apparently not. There are already between 5 and 8 super-kingdoms of Eukaryotes and a new one has just been found. Five to eight, don’t they know!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hemimastigotes-supra-kingdom

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0708-8

“Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that’s so different from other living things that it doesn’t fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms. A genetic analysis shows they’re more different from other organisms than animals and fungi are from each other, representing a completely new part of the tree of life, Eglit and her colleagues report this week in the journal Nature.”

The following chart gives the new tree of life, for Eukaryotes. I’m looking for plants, animals and fungi in here. Don’t see them.

Ah, plants are represented by Arabidopsis in superkingdom Archaeplastida. Animals are represented by Homo in superkingdom Abozoa. Fungi in … found it, in Spizellomyces, also in the superkingdom Abozoa.

This is so incredibly different to the classic three kingdoms of eukaryotes. (Shakes head in wonderment).

Just a few decades ago, all of these other than plants, animals and fungi would have been lumped into a single group of “protista”. The first breakup of protista into animal-like-protist and plant-like-protist didn’t occur until the year 1998.

mollwollfumble said:

The “kingdoms” of eukaryotes are plants, animals and fungi, right?

Apparently not. There are already between 5 and 8 super-kingdoms of Eukaryotes and a new one has just been found. Five to eight, don’t they know!

Obviously there are mathematicians involved.

For a more palatable and older version of the Eukaryote family tree see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obazoa

Interesting that Amoebidium is not a member of the Amoebozoa.

Obazoa would make an interesting web name, but it needs to be a binary name:

Obazoa OBAFGKM, Obazoa Obi-Wan, Obazoa neanderthal, Obazoa Obama.
Nah, not working.

My other thought is that all this happened in the far Precambrian. If the sponges are treated as very early animals, then the split between Homo and Monosiga happened before 580 million years ago. “The single-celled choanoflagellates resemble the choanocyte cells of sponges which are used to drive their water flow systems and capture most of their food.” So we’re talking about an origin of the Eukaryotes of the rough order of 900 million years ago. That’s not too bad. Around about the start of the Neoproterozoic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precambrian near the start of the Tonian.

“Five to eight, don’t they know!”

It is, to an extent, arbitrary. We’re talking about pigeonholing and demarcation, not natural absolutes.

I’m more a fan of the Willi Hennig cladistics model, and Phylocode. There’s not much value in the old-school taxonomic ranks.

dv said:

I’m more a fan of the Willi Hennig cladistics model, and Phylocode. There’s not much value in the old-school taxonomic ranks.

That sounds promising, but I don’t recognise it. Can you explain?

dv said:

I’m more a fan of the Willi Hennig cladistics model, and Phylocode. There’s not much value in the old-school taxonomic ranks.

One year ago I would have agreed with you. But back last March I noticed that Clades have got completely out of hand. The cartoon below is now out of date. Instead of “Eukaryota Unikonta Opisthokonta Holozoa Filozoa Animalia “ we now have “Eukaryota Podiata Unikonta Obazoa Opisthokonta Holozoa Filozoa Choanozoa Animalia” with another three levels of clades added since March 2018.

With the proliferation of clades, and multiple names for the same clade (Unikonta=Amorphea, Podiata=Sulcozoa=Sarcomastigota) it’s possible to argue that no clade lasts long enough to be of significant scientific value.