August 16, 2009
A recent publication on Megapiranha paranensis from Phenoscape curators Wasila Dahdul and John Lundberg is in the news!
DURHAM, N.C. — How did piranhas — the legendary freshwater fish with the razor bite — get their telltale teeth? Researchers from Argentina, the United States and Venezuela have uncovered the jawbone of a striking transitional fossil that sheds light on this question. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously unknown fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins. Read the rest of this entry »
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Data Curation, Morphology, Publications, Science, Teleosts | 
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Posted by tjvision
May 18, 2008
Searching as well as visualizing the Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO) on the NCBO Bioportal was broken for more than a week but has been fixed since Friday.
The other good update from the Bioportal development is that terms can now be found by their synonyms as well. For example, try searching TAO for the ‘dermosphenotic’, which at present isn’t the name of a term in the ontology. Instead, you get the ‘infraorbital 5‘, for which dermosphenotic is a synonym.
Fish morphologists will note that this is actually problematic, since in reality the dermosphenotic is the synonym for the last infraorbital bone. In zebrafish, with which we seeded the TAO, this is indeed the 5th in the series of infraorbitals, but in other clades of teleosts it is the 6th or yet another one. But that’s another story, which we’ll highlight in a forthcoming post on building the TAO.
Leave a Comment » | Anatomy Ontology, Teleosts | Tagged: NCBO | Permalink
Posted by Hilmar
May 14, 2008
One of the two main ontologies developed and used by the Phenoscape project is the Teleost Taxonomy Ontology (TTO). Although the Phenoscape project is focused on the Ostariophysi, the TTO covers not just teleosts, but all the species listed in Bill Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fish. This post will discuss how the current TTO was constructed and the work flow we use to update it. A later posting will discuss the effort to update the ontology to better represent current thinking about metaphysical status of species and other taxonomic terms.
Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Ontology, Taxonomy Ontology, Teleosts | Tagged: NCBO, taxonomy | Permalink
Posted by pmidford
